Fortitude—enduring the tired, tedious and unremarkable chores—is what makes the difference between those who dream and those who do.

Why am I talking about this? Because recently I saw some quote scroll past on social media. It was something (of course) posted by one of those super happy “life coach” people.

Though I’m certain the quote was meant to inspire, it hit a sour note with me. It seemed dismissive of the pain, sacrifice and—yes, suffering—of those willing to dream, and then stick to that dream. It bypassed the fortitude necessary for success.

I don’t recall the quote’s exact wording (they’re all so similar), but the saccharin essence was the same. Apparently, if you don’t LOVE every single moment of what you’re doing, then maybe you don’t have the right career.

Keep searching! Dream! You have a right to be HAPPY! If it isn’t making you HAPPY, then MOVE ON!

See, writing—much like any worthy undertaking—comes part and parcel with a lot of drudgery and loads of stuff we’d rather not do.

Fortitude & Learning Curve Drudgery 

A lot of folks believe that just because they’re proficient in their native language, they are then automatically qualified to write amazing fiction. Yeah…no.

Not judging at all. I used to be one of those people. I had zero concept how ridiculously hard it was to craft a readable story, let alone a good one.

Writing a novel that could span anywhere from 50K to 150K words (depending on genre) that manages to grab then hold a reader’s interest? AHHHH! Balancing plot points, plot arc, character, dialogue, scene and sequel, A-lines, B-lines, on and on?

It doesn’t take too long to understand why many great authors turned to booze and drugs.

*gives Poe a pass on the whole “heroin addiction'” thing*

Far too many writers start out believing the first novel they write is perfect, and if anyone counters this? They fall apart. Some give up. A few hire “editors” who are happy to tell them “the other meanie editor was totes unprofessional and it’s fiiiine to have fourteen POVs…all from cats.”

Others double-down on the denial and write a sequel or—God help us all—a series of equally crappy books that don’t sell.

Why?

Because learning to write novels is hard.

I’ve been through this, myself. My two formative mentors both made me cry…a LOT. And I am NOT a person who cries.

These mentors were nothing like my writing group. My writing group was so encouraging!

Bob and Les didn’t tell me my writing was unicorn tears, they told me it was more like what might come out of the other end of a unicorn.

No, not a unicorn. A hyena with tapeworm and a bad case of mange.

*weeps*

I didn’t love writing the same stuff over and over. Guess what? Didn’t always love reading and rereading the books they recommended I study.

Come to think of it, I didn’t love putting out my best only for it to come back with so much red I wondered if it had been hit by a bus then SHOT before they returned it.

Sure I could have quit. Thought about it a lot. A lot. Because shouldn’t I LOOOVE every moment of what I do? But, I didn’t quit because I wanted to become an excellent writer. I required more than glittery sparkly talent. I had to hone and develop fortitude.

I’m still a work in progress.

My critique group were fantastic cheerleaders, which we need…but not necessarily to make us better.

Cheerleaders look super pretty, but cheerleaders don’t train touchdowns.

Coaches who call out bad form, terrible plays, and awful habits create winners. These experts are hired to criticize, make a player watch footage over and over and, if warranted, do cherry-pickers until the player wants to DIE. Might seem “mean” but THIS is what will help that player make touchdowns.

Drudgery. Not pom-pom waving.

Fortitude: Welcome to the GRIND

There’s drudgery in the actual writing. Oh no! Yes, you heard it here first. Writing, while one of the BEST jobs in the world, contains more than its fair share of suckage.

The first draft can be loads of fun, until the mire of Act Two where you find yourself contemplating sudden and unexpected alien abduction—either for yourself to spring you from writing, or for your characters because you’ve messed up somewhere in the plot and written yourself into a corner.

Becoming successful in writing (or anything really) is never in the BIG things we do. It’s the compilation of a lot of small acts that build up over time.

It is showing up day after day even when we’d rather get a root canal than figure out what went sideways somewhere between page 1 and page 400.

We have to research, proofread, edit, revise, and all of this takes focus and time and pain. By the time a book is “ready” to be published, odds are pretty decent we’ll hate our own book and hope we never have to read it again.

***FYI: The feeling passes…eventually. Most of the time. Maybe.

Publishing Drudgery

For those who still want to traditionally publish, there is the drudgery of writing synopses and query letters and researching agents. Add the drudgery of the actual querying and subsequent waiting.

Meanwhile, most of us have day jobs and laundry and family members who expect to be fed every day #HighMaintenance.

Oh, and make sure to start writing the next book (refer to the love-fest above).

For those who choose a non-traditional path, we have to locate and hire the best people. Or maybe learn to format or design a cover ourselves. There may be multiple iterations of a cover. Then, if we believe we’ve found all our typos in our seventeen (hundred) passes? *clutches sides laughing*

And if we believe the proofreaders and editors caught all them too? Maybe, but..

On top of this, add in bookkeeping, record keeping, accounting, building a platform, understanding keywords and SEO and blah, blah, blah.

Suffice to say that YES, writing is a WONDERFUL job! I wouldn’t be here twenty years later if it was all bad. Yet, I do have to confess that choosing to become a writer showed me the worst parts of my character…in Technicolor.

I didn’t start blogging because I EVER believed my blog would be what it is today with millions of unique visitors. Want to know why I began blogging? I had ZERO self-discipline.

I’d become a person who didn’t want to do anything that I didn’t LOVE. If I wasn’t having FUN, then clearly I’d chosen the wrong career, right?

Wrong.

The Fortitude Factor

People who reach their goals and dreams are different for sure. Are they more gifted? Talented? Unusually good-looking? Perhaps. But, more often than not, these folks excel at handling the boring parts of the dream.

To which I shall refer to one of my favorite books on achievement. James Clear’s Atomic Habits (which I HIGHLY recommend), is fabulous. Yet, this quote in particular piqued my attention:

The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still working.

~ James Clear, Atomic Habits

You have NO idea how often I hear, “If I only had the TIME, I’d write more.” As if time is laying around in the couch cushions with the petrified Cheerios and the TV remote no one’s seen Twilight was popular.

Hey, I have been guilty here, too. Still can fall into old (bad) habits if I fail to remain vigilant. Yes, even after a pandemic when we all had more time than we knew what to do with.

The reason people (mistakenly) believe they must FIND TIME? It’s likely because they’ve hit the part of the writing process that’s actual WORK. It’s ceased to be a glorious high.

And, if they don’t start a new book (chasing the high), then they put off writing altogether using excuses more creative than their plot ideas.

Hey! Told y’all I have been guilty too…so no hating .

Yet, when we look at anything worth achieving, from writing an amazing book to being a great parent to running a profitable business, we see that it is how these individuals handle the millions of unremarkable unexciting and downright soul-crushing (but necessary) tasks that makes all the difference.

We see the same common denominator in every success story, from the legendary athletes willing to do the same drills over and over until perfected to the entrepreneurs who mined drudgery for the edge they needed to outpace all competition.

Fortitude: Can You Handle Being BORED?

Everyone loves new beginnings. The new relationship with no baggage and all hugs and kisses, the smell of the fresh notebook, the empty page waiting for all of our brilliant ideas. We love the new blog because it holds so much promise.

Then there is the new workout from YouTube, the new diet we found on Instagram, the new craft project we saw on Pinterest….

A lot of us fixate on whether we can handle the BIG moments, the MAJOR crises but I’d actually offer different advice. We need to ask the hard question.

Can we fall in love with pain and process as much as the end result? Everyone loves the summit selfie but few want the climb. It comes with hypoxia and pretty good odds you’ll die and no one will be able to claim your frozen corpse…ever.

Many of us LOVE the idea of six-pack abs…but we LOVE tacos more. We struggle after a few weeks. Why? Because we are tired, sore, and even though we’ve been working out for a WHOLE MONTH, we still don’t have a ripped physique.

Heck, we can’t even see a muscle. We’re tired of the pile of smelly clothes, the aches and pains and having to measure all our food. It isn’t FUN. In fact, it’s downright tedious.

We don’t LOVE the gym, the job, the book, the YouTube channel anymore because it’s day after day of nothing all that special…and pain.

Lots of that.

Catching Fire

Yet, all these small actions add up over time. When we embrace the dull actions and commit, we will eventually ignite. Ray Bradbury poetically asserted paper had an ignition point of 451 degrees Fahrenheit. The actual number is about thirty degrees higher.

Paper will burst into flames at about 480 degrees Fahrenheit (without being directly exposed to flame).

Using this analogy, let’s take our metaphorical paper and heat it to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then 250, then 300, then 440, then 451. Boy, this is boring and taking a LONG time and taking energy. Nothing is happening.

Heat it to 460, then 470, then 477 and then throw up your hands because paper NEVER sets on fire without a high-budget marketing plan…I mean match.

Or, maybe there is a marked transformation somewhere between 477 degrees and 482 degrees. At 477 degrees Fahrenheit all looks the same. Oh but add in a little more energy and IGNITION. And this ignition all occurs within a range of a couple degrees.

Then…BOOM!

The same goes for becoming a successful author (as in a professional who’s PAID to play with our imaginary friends). A major key to success largely rests on how we handle the boring parts. Can we keep going, keep putting on the heat when it looks as if nothing is happening?

Success doesn’t have a canonized ignition point. If it did, being successful would be easy. Fortitude is a massive game changer.

If I knew I had to write five books, three series, add in a hundred blogs and forty three good reviews to reach literary stardom? Dang skippy I’d stick with it. There wouldn’t be ANY drudgery, because I’d have certainty.

But that’s the problem.

The ignition point for succeeding in anything is anything but certain (and might not even exist in some cases). It differs between people, generations, goals, industries, abilities, etc. We DON’T KNOW and THAT is precisely why drudgery can so easily undo us if we lack the fortitude to outlast it.

In the End

I want all your dreams to catch fire—your dreams to write, create, to be an excellent parent or partner, to achieve the remarkable.

If you can appreciate that every masterpiece began as a blank canvas, a hunk of marble, an ugly cement foundation, a sketch, or an idea and that IN BETWEEN there was a lot of wash, rinse, repeat and fortitude (which we can control)? You’re on your way to reaching those goals.

We’re rarely limited by our talent, yet we’re all too often hobbled by impatience. Drudgery makes us cave in too soon. It takes time to hone skills, learn a craft, build an audience, etc. Just keep pressing and hopefully you’ll see your ignition point and it will be the most beautiful light you’ve ever seen.

Then you get to do it again for the next goal . *smoochies*

But, you’ll be better and stronger because you know to expect the span of suck before the breakthrough! You will have strengthened and honed the fortitude required to finish. And the cool thing is, the more we work it, the stronger it gets.

What Are Your Thoughts?

I love hearing from you! Do you struggle with the doldrums in your dreams? Is it hard not to just start something new? Are your fortitude muscles weak? Have you been starting over so much that maybe that’s why you aren’t further along? Are you so sick of your book you want to cry? #GotTheTShirt

Don’t you wish we had the magic “temperature” where our dreams LIT UP? Some way to know if we were close? Or even heading in the correct direction? Have you struggled with learning to finish what you start? Been too easily distracted?

The post Fortitude: Dream, Do, Then Keep on DOING Day After Day appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Small steps are the most essential for achieving anything in life, yet they’re also the most underestimated. They are too easy to overlook or dismiss.

Unlike when we were kids, no one is handing out stickers or scented erasers to reward us for a day well done. There’s no list on the wall showcasing the names of those who put in the extra work and accomplished just…a…little…more than their peers.

So you got up and went to work this morning. Did anyone notice? When you finished reading and replying to those emails, did you get a thrill of electricity? You cleaned your house, kept your kids alive, paid your bills and didn’t run anyone off the road.

What does it matter?

No stickers for “Hey, I Didn’t Go to JAIL Today” or “I Didn’t Tell My Boss Off” or “I Returned my Grocery Cart Even Though Some Idiot Designed the Parking Lot Where the Return Corral was A MILE AWAY”. Okay, the last one might not fit on a sticker.

The others? Someone needs to get on that.

Who really notices what we do as much as they notice when we FAIL to do the same things? My family might not cheer me on for doing the laundry, but they sure notice when they run out of clean socks.

It feels as if we’re trapped in a world of homeostasis, and the needle never moves. But that is the lie. Big changes are always comprised of small steps. If we overlook small steps, then forget about setting goals, let alone reaching them.

This said, how do we keep going when, 99% of the time, it feels as if we are stuck in neutral?

Small Steps on a Realistic Path

I work very hard to be a positive person, but here’s some news you might like…or not. Whatever.

Perpetual positivity is extremely unhealthy. It’s actually a form of denial.

Sometimes life does suck. The odds CAN actually be against us. We face very real challenges every day. Acknowledging obstacles is what separates dedicated dreamers from hopeful fools.

In business, we run something known as a S.W.O.T. Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Obstacles, Threats). How Debbie Downer of me, right? Um, no. If we seek to achieve anything worthwhile, from cleaning out the sewing room to successfully publishing a book, we need a REALISTIC view of what’s ahead.

Most of you who subscribe to this blog appreciate that bluntness is my superpower. I’m candid because I genuinely care about you and am vested in your success.

Also, I did all the stupid things SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO. Take advantage!

If we’re going to take small steps on a grand adventure toward worthy goals, then it’s a GREAT idea to make sure we are heading the correct direction.

Genius stuff here. I KNOW!

But how many people say they want to be professional authors who sell enough books to write full time, but then they rarely write? They might finish the book but have done NOTHING to build a brand—which is when our name alone has the power to sell books.

Have they studied craft, writing, self-editing, or even the business of their business? Do they have a plan as to how they’ll actually SELL those books?

STOP NOW: Writing is a FOOL’S ERRAND

Bear with me.

You want to write novels? Series? Think you have what it takes to be the next J.K. Rowling? Odds are, you don’t. Think you have what it takes to at least make a healthy living writing books? Again, odds unfavorable.

Did you know that, according to Book Expo of America statistics, back in 2004, writers had a 96% failure rate? 96% of all authors published sold fewer than 1,000 books. And, of that number, over 50% sold fewer than 500 books. Most sold around 100.

And this was back before self-publishing and social media. These were largely agented authors with publishers and placement in bookstores.

One would think the numbers are better now, but not according to Forbes. Self-publishing is hardly a way to get rich quick. 20% of authors make ABSOLUTELY NO MONEY, and the median income is around $5,000 a year.

This number is skewed by a VERY small percentage of top earners (those earning $100,000 or more), so likely this median number is lower.

With well over a million books hitting the market, and this number compounding every year, most books will languish in literary limbo until the writer finally just sucks it up and accepts reality.

It was never meant to happen to begin with. Was never in the cards or the stars or the chicken bones…and WOW, I almost lost my “I Didn’t Day Drink” sticker!

Fail to Plan and Plan to Fail

The difference in the successful writer—whatever you define that to be—and the unsuccessful is all in the small steps.

How many of the zillions of writers who ran out to self-publish were still writing like it was 1999? When the ONE goal all writers fixated on was writing A GOOD BOOK?

Being a 21st century author is a LOT more than about writing and finishing a book (in fact, statistically it is all but impossible to make money with A BOOK). If our goal—HONESTLY—is to make a living writing, then there’s a LOT more work ahead.

Even if we decide to outsource certain jobs (I.e. cover design, formatting, internal design) we must get educated. There are too many grifters out there peddling fool’s gold to authors who want shortcuts.

This was why I wrote a Dummies’ Writers’ Guide to SEO recently. Feel free to outsource keywords and web stuff to experts, but have the knowledge to hire and fire wisely.

Who ARE You?

We are what we consistently DO. Hobbyists dabble and create when the mood strikes. Pros get to work no matter what. It doesn’t matter if you’ve not yet published a book. Ditch the imposter syndrome and suck it up. Writers *shock face* WRITE!

Understand it is OKAY to be a hobbyist. Just don’t expect pro rewards with a hobbyist work ethic. This is why it’s crucial to first define what kind of author you want to be.

If you’re writing solely for pleasure then you don’t need a business plan. But, if you want to replace the day job, then it’s career suicide to approach writing like the hobbyist.

Think about it. If you only showed up to your current day job when you were “in the mood” or “the muse visited”, how long would you remain employed?

There are GOOD reasons why this profession isn’t for everyone.

So, when we begin this ‘journey’ are we even pointing in the correct DIRECTION? Hobbyist or professional? That is a huge deal!

If I’m in Texas and my GOAL is to walk to California, then I really should check I am—at the very least—pointing WEST.

Granted I CAN, theoretically, reach California from Texas heading EAST, but what are the odds I’ll give up trying to circumnavigate the entire planet? Small steps are HUGE when I am walking a couple thousand miles down interstate highways, but it is DOABLE. At 15 miles a day, I can reach California in about 4.5 months.

The other direction? Fuggetaboutit.

Same with being a professional author. Yes, the odds are against us. But how much of that ‘bad luck’ do we have the power to change?

Small Steps & Brutal Honesty

What are ALL the obstacles standing in your way? List them and add to the list as you go along. Yes…as you go along. As you gain higher levels of expertise you’ll trade old problems for (hopefully) better problems.

This isn’t me being a Negative Nelly. It’s recognizing that, if I see a mountain range on the map in between where I am and where I want to go, it’s smart to look for the path through the mountains before I get there.

No amount of positive thinking is going to make those mountains vanish.

If I skip along to the metaphorical Alps with no plan, I will still be required to make a plan. Either I’ll have to plan a retreat or I’ll plan to find a path…and waste a ton of time and resources searching for a route I could have easily accounted for in the beginning.

Also, if I want to take on a trek of this magnitude, I need to account for internal obstacles. Self-doubt, burnout, stress, isolation, etc.

Same with writing. The author mountain range might be invisibility. How do we PLAN on standing apart from millions of other books? If we have a plan ahead of time, this prepares us mentally as well.

When we don’t immediately make a gazillion dollars, we keep on the paths that have the best reputation for delivering authors through that massive obstacle (I.e. multiple books, a series, a good blog, a strong social media following, etc.). Small steps. One foot in front of the other.

Trust in the process and that compounded efforts are like compound interest. Hard to see anything notable in the short-term, but then one day, BAMMO! The world sees an ‘overnight success.’

Small Steps Around Big Obstacles

I understand that life gets in the way. But I also appreciate the power of even small snippets of focused time. It’s why I’ve PAID for a Ning called W.A.N.A.Tribe for TWELVE YEARS.

(W.A.N.A. stands for We are not alone.)

Since I pay for this out of my own pocket, there are no ads or bots. We’ve been meeting every day, every week to do writing sprints for almost EIGHT YEARS. It is a virtual office space where one of us sets a timer for an hour, people join in the sprint (in the CHAT forum), and at the end, we relay what we accomplished.

Then, we chit chat a few minutes and do the next sprint and the next and the next. I’ve, personally, finished nine books, a novella and hundreds of articles using the sprints.

Some of us stay most of the day or even all day. I mix up sprints where I write with sprints where I clean, cook, and homeschool my 12-year-old son. It’s an amazing place for accountability. We have permission to leave the laundry, the dishes, the bills, the pets and kids for AT LEAST ONE HOUR…to write.

Here’s the weird thing, though. Out of almost 3300 members, any guess how many regularly show up for sprints?

Maybe 20, if I’m being generous.

But, want to know a fun fact about those who show up consistently? Almost all of them are highly successful multi-published authors.

Telling, isn’t it?

These writers all have lives. They have families, children, health issues, ailing parents or family members. We all have our share of crises, but guess what? We aren’t any better, any more talented. The only difference is we consistently show up.

Life Size is Bite-Size with Small Steps

I don’t mention the lackluster attendance on W.A.N.A.Tribe to make anyone feel badly. But think about pre-Internet. How many authors had a free and designated workspace with peers around almost every day to encourage and offer help when needed? Think how many authors dreamed of such a place.

Heck, I did, which was why I built it.

Trust me! I wish I ONLY had to worry my pretty little head about writing. Today, while working on this post, I have done the dishes, sorted, washed and folded laundry, cleaned the kitchen, cooked, cleaned the kitchen AGAIN and organized my vitamin cabinet.

Why?

Because LIFE is Messy & BIG

And needs to be broken into manageable bits. I can write about 500-800 words in a sprint, but then I need to move around unless I want back pain. Also, those dishes—sadly—aren’t going to wash themselves.

The vitamins are sorted and the ones that tried to bite me? I tossed. Then I did a quick guided meditation on my phone. NOW, I am back doing a sprint WRITING.

I use lists and timers for everything I do, all the small steps. It keeps me focused and on task and I accomplish a lot more (especially when there are others to hold me to task). But even if we reduced W.A.N.A.Tribe down to ONE sprint five days a week for six months SOLELY dedicated to writing..

How much could one get written?

What habits might one form? Is it reasonable to assume with just these small steps—logging in, writing for an hour a day, day after day—that it would be easier to self-identify as a professional author instead of a dabbler who maybe one day will get around to being amazing?

Obviously, I’d love everyone to use W.A.N.A. Tribe. The more the weirder! Does it matter if only 12 people continue using it? No. I don’t make any money off it. It’s really just a virtual office for those who choose to make writing a priority.

You We Are Not Alone

I certainly do not pretend to have my act together. In fact, I can only look at watercolor paintings if I’m on Instagram lest I give up all hope.

Anything worth achieving isn’t going to be easy, but we can improve our odds of success by simply being honest about our obstacles as well as what we want…then breaking all this down to bite-sized pieces.

Every massive success (or failure) is made up of small steps. In fact, I could make a case that it is impossible to trace the beginning of…anything. Couples don’t ONE DAY end up in a nasty divorce. That nasty divorce is comprised of many small steps taken or not taken. Then, we could go back before they married to their childhoods, their genetic predispositions, then farther and farther and father back.

The same can be said for success.

This is why it is key to simply DECIDE and START. Commit to showing up, whether that is as a writer, a partner, a parent, a whatever. When it comes to writing, you are not alone. Your chances of forming new habits and reaching goals vastly improves with a support network.

Feel free to use the Chat over at W.A.N.A. Tribe, or join a writing group, start your own. Just DO IT. Small steps are DOABLE as in TODAY, RIGHT NOW. They are simple to repeat. Just small steps day after day, month after month will take you thousands of miles from where you began.

Looking forward to seeing where y’all go! Btw, if you sign up for W.A.N.A. Tribe, I have to manually approve you. I try to be as instant as possible, but this is what keeps the bots away.

Thoughts? I LOVE hearing from you!

Do you REALLY think of yourself as a writer? An author? Are you guilty of dabbling when you really need to set a schedule?

For the record, I have had times I HAD to take off and resort to being more of a hobbyist. Burnout is a real thing. Rest is crucial. This said, how can we do better at making what time we have extra fruitful? How do you get the most out of your minutes?

***Btw, for those who want to make a living writing, make sure to scroll down and check out the classes below. When you treat yourself as a business, which you are, then classes are an INVESTMENT. All these classes will help you up the quantity AND quality of your writing.

I love hearing from you!

What do you WIN? For the month of APRIL, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice.

What do you win?

The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

Small Steps to Start

The Write Stuff Special: 20 pages for $55

Only TEN SLOTS AVAILABLE! Offer ends May 4th, 2020. Sign up HERE.

Small Steps with Classes

***All classes come with a FREE recording

Bring on the BINGE: How to Plot & Write a Series

Thursday, May 19, 2022 7-9:30 P.M. NYC Time

For more information, SIGN UP HERE.

The Art of Character: Writing Characters for a SERIES

Thursday, May 26th 7:00-10:00 P.M. NYC Time

For more information, SIGN UP HERE.

Practice Your Pitch: Master the Log-Line

Thursday, June 2nd, 7:00-9:00 P.M. NYC Time. This is a TWO-HOUR INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP!

For more information, SIGN UP HERE.

The post Small Steps & The Value of Simply SHOWING UP appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

‘Change’ is a pretty big buzzword about this time of year. New year, new me and all that jazz. How many of us, year after year after year make lists, draft resolutions, and vow THIS time we’ll not only change, but change for good, but….

*insert sound of deflating balloon here*

There are many reasons why we might not be getting the results we want. Maybe we are trying to alter the external symptoms instead of searching for the internal causation. Perhaps we are trying to change and we aren’t the actual problem. We might be taking on too much too quickly.

Yada yada yada…every New Year’s post ever. Right?

I hope not. I’d like to (hopefully) take a different approach. What does change really mean? Let’s look to the word.

C-Catalysts are Necessary for CHANGE

I get most of you have probably slept since Chemistry class, but this is simple enough. If I’m in a lab, and I want to change one substance into a different substance, then what is one necessary ingredient?

A catalyst.

I must add in another ingredient that shakes things up, that forces one or more elements to give up, add, share, or exchange electrons. The catalyst fundamentally alters the original substance and a byproduct of all this change is—drum roll—HEAT.

What can we take from this? Well, 2020 was a Dumpster fire and 2021 wasn’t that much better. Why did we moan and groan? CHANGE.

And trust me, most of us FELT the HEAT.

Yet, how did a string of seriously inconvenient/terrifying/world-altering events change us for the better?

Maybe we learned patience, how to be kinder, the importance of self-care. We might have become keenly aware of just how much we’d taken for granted (family, concerts, travel, dining out, shopping, going to a workplace with real, living people).

All great changes that never would have happened without a catalyst.

H-Help is Available

How many times do we try to change but we try to do it on our own? We are embarrassed, ashamed, or maybe just underestimate our own abilities. Hey, I am as guilty as anyone.

I used to LIVE in the gym…then COVID happened and my gym shut down for months. THEN, I went to a specialist and found out I had Hashimoto’s Disease. I eat crazy healthy because of all my food allergies. But, between stress, illness, numerous deaths, being sedentary, and my regular doctors ignoring a serious thyroid issue? I put on weight.

Aaaand that is why I go to the gym when no one is there.

It’s silly. I KNOW. But I’m too embarrassed to attend my old group classes or go to a trainer because I’m ashamed. In this instance? HELP would probably be a good thing.

However, if I can’t set aside my ego and ask? I’ll make reaching my goal of not having to live in yoga pants forever much harder to reach.

A-Action Matters

Some people say starting is the hardest part. True. When it comes to a LOT of things, I say FINISHING is the hardest part. Yet, when applied to how we live our lives? We won’t be ‘finished’ until we’re dead.

So starting it is!

Too many people underestimate the power of small actions every day, day after day, week after week, month after month.

We all want the HUGE change. I mean, I don’t get it. Most of the time, as I mentioned, I eat ridiculously healthy. But I have two pieces of pizza and it feels like I grow an extra @$$ overnight. Go four days eating holiday food and it is a HUGE difference. So why shouldn’t eating four days super healthy be the same?

It isn’t. We all know it doesn’t work this way, and yes I am bitter about it.

But it is what it is. Instead of fixating on an entire lifestyle overhaul, pick a handful of actions that would get you where you want to be…then do that over and over and over.

Wanna lose weight? Drink water, get to bed at a reasonable time, set a timer and move throughout the day, etc.

When I was pregnant, I did two-a-days the entire 10 months. I swam a mile in the morning, then did weights in the evening with Hubby. How did I do this? I told myself all I HAD to do was walk into the gym and do FIVE minutes. If, after FIVE minutes, I felt ill, weak, tired, horrible (which when you’re pregnant is legit), then I could leave.

In all ten months I only left TWICE.

Instead of setting a goal to work out three days a week, try setting a goal of just checking into the gym three days a week. Why? Because once you’ve gone that far, usually you’ll at least do SOMETHING, which is better than nothing.

Same with writing. Set a goal of 250 words. That is A page. Once you finish 250? If you have to go? Go. But do this day after day and soon you’ll have a first draft and then a novel.

N-Nerve Can be a GOOD Thing

Nerve can be defined as, “the power of endurance or control.” Obviously, this is critical for generating and maintaining change. Yet, nerve also has a negative connotation that means to be presumptuous, to have the audacity or gall to do X.

I grew up in a rather toxic family, and I imagine I’m not alone in that. Did you have members of your family who shamed you for wanting, for dreaming, for daring to forget your place? ‘Friends,’ colleagues, acquaintances who mocked, undermined or sabotaged you for wanting to do something different or to dream big?

Those negative messages can feel all but impossible to erase.

For example, I was largely reared by my Great Depression grandparents. In ways, this was great because I am frugal, I save, I’m an excellent money manager. But, at the same time? I deprive myself and feel guilty for taking a break, a vacation and GOD FORBID…buying myself something nice.

TRUE STORY About CHANGE

My grandfather helped me buy a used Mazda for college. Back in the 90s, however, there were no Lemon Laws and you really had no way of properly vetting a car. My grandfather had a unique talent for picking the biggest lemon on the lot.

I spent thousands of dollars on repairs, and even learned to do many repairs myself because poverty is the mother of innovation. Finally, I was tired of going to school full-time and working two jobs only to have most of my income go to yet ANOTHER stupid car repair.

By some stroke of fortune, I happened to date a guy who did body work. He took one look at my Mazda and told me the reason I had so many problems was the car had been in a major collision. Whoever owned it had done the superficial body work, but the internals were a mess.

What did I do? I went out and bought my first new car…the most embarrassing car possible. But, it was cheap. No electronic locks or windows (fewer things to break), and it was a stick shift (cheaper than an automatic).

Funny fact? I had ZERO idea how to drive a stick. My dad had taught me, but I’d slept since I was ten (it was the 80s).

Meaning, I very literally bought a new car then TAUGHT MYSELF how to drive the darn thing on the back roads behind the dealership.

It was a Geo Metro.

My car was basically a highway-ready lawnmower that almost shook to pieces if I went over 65 mph.

Though it was technically a Chevrolet, I knew it had a Honda engine and it got up to 45 miles per gallon. My car payment was $200 a month and my insurance dropped to like $60. Not only that, but the dealership gave me a $400 gas card with purchase…which lasted at least SIX MONTHS (including long road trips).

I rushed home to show off my “new car” expecting my grandparents to be proud. Even though I went to a fancy private school (scholarship, of course) where most kids drove BMWs and Range Rovers, I’d chosen to be responsible. AND I was willing to proudly park my pregnant roller skate next to any Mercedes.

But what happened?

My grandparents shamed me and berated me for having the NERVE to buy a new car. Didn’t matter that it had a warranty, no damage, was super reliable and cheaper than repairing a used car over and over and over. No, I was out of line for daring to buy something that wasn’t used.

To this day? I struggle. I’m learning to trade in the toxic nerve for the good kind of nerve. Learning I can have nice things and feel GOOD about it.

E-EVERYONE has Same 24 Hours…is BULL SPRINKLES

For more on this, refer to a previous post Advice: The Great, the Bad & Good Intentions Turned Toxic Dogma.

I see this idea all over social media and quoted in books and it is total and complete horse $#!&. But, how many of us run out and buy motivational books? Books on goals and reaching our dreams, and what do many of them do?

SHAME US for not trying HARD enough.

No, I call bull sprinkles.

Leonardo DaVinci did NOT have the SAME 24 hours unless he was doing laundry, bills, dishes, homeschooling, answering emails, and forced to attend pointless meetings about why no one is being productive….while paining The Mona Lisa.

I don’t recall Einstein having to drop the chalk and set aside The Theory of Relativity, to run and pick up a kid who was puking at school.

Did Walt Disney pioneer animation WHILE taking care of young children and elderly parents and also working 40 hours a week in retail hell? NO.

And Arianna Huffington? I won’t go there. If you want more, feel free to read Shame on You AOL/Huffington! NO More Literary Booty Calls.

So help me, if I read one more motivational book written by someone who can afford STAFF who then berates regular working people for not using their time wisely? I WILL have a book burning.

And yes this last one has me ranty, but we have to ditch the lies.

Comparing Apples and Unicorns

I love motivational books, but frankly? A lot of them are a formula to fail.

Let your mind rest, play, and ignore people who tell you if you aren’t working a gazillion hours a week, you suck. Because, you know, famous workaholic CEO Marissa Mayer is a fabulous role model.

She enjoyed working 100+ hours a week! Go her. But she also expected the same level of dedication from employees. Of course, what’s missing? She built a private nursery next to her office after having her child. Did all the Yahoo employees have private nurseries next to their cubicles?

Going out on a limb, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t.

My point being…it’s a double-standard and learn to recognize and reject when a certain level of expectation is absurd. People who can build private nurseries and have a shower in their office have a very different 24 hours, and GO THEM!

You don’t think that I wouldn’t LOVE a full-time housekeeper, trainer and personal chef? No shame on people who have that, just don’t act like we all have the same day. I believe it is critical I use what time I have WISELY, but the amount of TIME is going to vary from person to person.

Change for the Better

In the end, I wish everyone a wonderful, fantastic and life-changing (in a good way) 2022. Expect there will be heat, ask for help, remember small actions ADD UP OVER TIME, believe you deserve your dreams, and maintain healthy perspective.

What are your thoughts on CHANGE?

I hope y’all feel empowered. Some of this advice is probably old but tried and true. Hopefully, however, I’ve offered some fresh perspectives.

If you have any tips or suggestions to add, I love learning new tips and tricks.

But do you feel defeated? Shamed because you are never DOING enough? Especially now that people are working from home a lot more. Are you crushed under the weight of ridiculous expectations (whether from yourself or others)?

Do you struggle with asking for help? Is it hard for you to relax without feeling lazy Do you feel guilt if you buy yourself something nice? Selfish if you dare to dream big?

I love hearing from you, and I am NOT above BRIBERY!

What do you WIN? For the month of DECEMBER, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice.

What do you win?

The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

***New 2022 classes will be listed next post. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The post CHANGE: A Simple Formula for the Life You WANT appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Commitment is a rare quality. Always has been and always will be. One main reason? Commitment, though simple, is far from easy. It will test us mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Often, it’s hard to see the benefits and so we rationalize quitting.

Today, I’d like to parse this concept. Commitment is one of those buzz words that pepper inspirational quotes, but um, yeah…

HOW, exactly do we DO this commitment thing? Better still, how do we NOT do it? Because, as I like to say, ‘Persistence can look a lot like stupid.’

If I have committed to climbing Mt. Everest, but I keep scaling the side of Mt. Shasta, then I’m not committed…I’m apparently VERY bad at geography since I’m climbing the WRONG MOUNTAIN!

I’m pretty sure most of us have had times in our lives that we threw everything we had into something, only to wake up one day and realize we were ON THE WRONG MOUNTAIN.

*face palm*

There’s Power in the Pause

I tend to be a person of extremes. Yes, yes, I know *shock face.* This can be a good thing. When I set my mind to something I will work until half dead to accomplish my goal(s). This has served me well in some areas. In others?

Not so much.

I’ve historically been guilty of all-or-nothing thinking. It’s why I was such a dedicated blogger for so many years. I blogged literally no matter what, arguably to the point of being ridiculous.

One such occasion? I’d been up until three in the morning by my favorite aunt’s bedside until she finally passed away. With only a couple hours of sleep, I willed myself into my chair and posted a blog about editing…only to make a major typo IN THE TITLE because I was so exhausted.

See? I told y’all persistence can look a lot like stupid .

I know WHY I did this. Most of my younger years I had ZERO self-discipline. The moment I wasn’t the best or became bored or didn’t have a giant cheer squad telling me I was a super-mega-genius? I quit. I constantly flitted from one shiny to another.

In short? I was a flake.

As to that blog I bungled? I was afraid NOT to post, terrified I’d somehow jinx myself. I’d miss ONE blog and suddenly fall back into all those old bad habits.

Seems silly now. Not so much back then.

Yeah, yeah, I now know it would have served me better to lighten the hell up. But I’d started blogging to learn how to show up not matter what my feelings said. I knew if I was ever going to make it as an author (or anything) I HAD to learn self-discipline and commitment.

Here we are. I’ve been blogging now almost 14 years. This past year, however, has tested my priorities. I couldn’t do EVERYTHING, though I very much tried to.

When you commit to everything, you commit to nothing.

I’m an author, FIRST.

Hard lesson to learn. Though I’ve not been blogging as much, I’ve never stopped writing. As a professional? Gotta do the paid work first. As I’ve already mentioned, I stepped out of my comfort zone to do something new—ghostwriting.

It didn’t take long to realize that I simply couldn’t research, do interviews, learn to mimic another person’s voice, get words on the page AND do all the other activities I’ve enjoyed for so many years.

In short, I had to be committed to the client, to the book…all the way to THE END, regardless what happened. Oh and what DIDN’T happen? Oy vay!

In the eight months it took for me to finish the manuscript:

• I caught COVID, and it took three months to even feel somewhat human again
• Had to have our roof replaced
• Someone knocked over our mailbox and it had to be completely rebuilt
• House was struck by lightning, frying refrigerator and AC/heating unit which all had to be replaced
• Laptop crapped out and had to buy a new one
• Mom and Father in Law both had major abdominal surgery the same week

It was like every time I staggered to my feet from one hit, I was upright just in time for the next. But, years of training kept me going. I’ve learned to never underestimate the power of simply showing up day after day. We don’t have to make major accomplishments all the time. The small wins add up if we simply stay at it.

Granted, with all the other ‘stuff’ happening, I had to pare down my commitment list to the bare essentials, or essential. Finish the book.

Commitment isn’t a Straight Line

Life is, well…life. Sometimes, we’ll have to set aside one commitment for another. When Spawn was a baby, I had different priorities than I do now. Back then? Mostly keeping him alive. Now, homeschooling…and mostly keeping me alive .

As much as I’ve missed doing the familiar, being forced to narrow/prune/reprioritize my commitments showed me there’s power in the pause. Sometimes we need a break. We need to do something different, get our bearings, ask if we still really want whatever it was we set out to achieve.

Make sure that, if we want to scale Mt. Everest that we’re at least in the right country.

Admittedly I have a perfectionist, control-freak, Type A+ personality (A+ because I did the extra credit unlike those other slackers ). This is a double-edged sword, especially when it comes to commitment.

Why?

Commitment is messy, unpredictable, and will test everything you have.

To keep with my mountain-climbing analogy, how successful would I be if I set out up Mt. Everest at top speed and tried to maintain a breakneck pace all the way up?

***Hint: I used the word ‘breakneck.’

First of all, that would be impossible because of the nature of the terrain. Some places, I need to stop, assess, make sure of my gear, that I have a firm footing, that I am even on track up the path that leads to the summit.

The same can be said when we commit to anything worthwhile whether it’s writing a book, running a business, working out, parenting, being in a relationship, etc. It’s all uncharted territory that has ups and downs, and can change at any moment (for better or worse), even commitments that seem simple enough to keep.

I’ve learned that we need to first test ourselves to even have an idea of our limits. Yet, even once that’s done, never underestimate what your commitments might actually demand.

***As a note, though, most people underestimate what they are TRULY capable of. You can do more much more than you likely realize.

Failure is a Great Teacher

Strangely enough, much of what learning to do involves learning what not to do.

Back in my college years, I was an avid outdoors person. Loved camping, mountain-biking, canoeing, etc. Anyway, I was in Durango, Colorado and agreed to do a ‘beginner’s climb’ up the side of this almost vertical rock face.

Note I said almost vertical. It had just enough of an angle that I could use pressure to grip my way up with fingertips and my tiptoes.

In my mind, it was a climb for BEGINNERS. It wasn’t THAT big of a deal. Only about a hundred or so feet up. I’d done some bouldering and indoor climbing, so was pretty confident this would be a piece of cake.

Y’all sensing my first mistake?

It was all fun and games until just as I was almost to the top, a foothold I believed was solid gave way right as I was reaching for the next handhold…which also gave way.

***Just anticipate when $#@! goes wrong, it will likely not be one single thing.

Then? I have no idea what happened other than my dumb @$$ slid so fast down the side of this rock I’m shocked I didn’t catch fire.

The only thing that saved me was a safety rope. That and God loves children and idiots. I know because I’ve tested both.

***Gives nod to Mark Twain.

Fortunately, this mishap only cost me my favorite shirt and jeans (shredded) and more than a few layers of skin.

What does this have to do with commitment?

First, commitments, even seemingly simple and straightforward ones, can serve up large helpings of failure. There will be times where everything is going as we planned…until it isn’t. Even when we think we’ve taken all precautions, all the steps and thought everything through, there is always the unexpected.

***Refer to my list above.

Secondly, we can’t control everything, and can only control ourselves and what we do when we fall.

As for my climb?

After sliding down the rock face, I chatted with Jesus while I waited for my guide to make his way down to me. He (not Jesus) kindly offered to help me make my way to the bottom, because the base of the cliff was certainly was a lot closer than the top. Not to mention I was scraped up pretty badly.

Though tempting, I politely declined, gathered what was left of my pride and started back up until I made it to the top…then NEVER went climbing again.

Which brings me to another point about commitment. Sometimes a failure is a good indication whether to stay or to move on.

I’d had my adventure and survived it, but I didn’t love rock-climbing enough to ever go through that again.

I can’t say that about writing. No, I was determined to go pro, no matter what.

I’ve failed and failed and failed and failed, but with every failure, I’ve learned. Not only have I learned how to be better at my craft and my business, I’ve also learned that no matter how much I bleed? I LOVE writing enough to keep going no matter what. Writing has taught me to embrace ‘The SUCK’ and to LOVE being miserable.

Wait, WHAT?

You read correctly. For the serious artist, the committed artist, it’s imperative to learn to be miserable. To even take a sort of bizarre pride in it.

If you’ve not yet read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, I strongly recommend it. Though most of my copies are dog-eared and tattered, one of my favorite sections is How to Be Miserable.

Pressfield talks about his brief stint in the United States Marine Corps.

There is a myth that Marine training turns baby-faced recruits into bloodthirsty killers. Trust me, the Marine Corps is not that efficient. What it does teach, however, is a lot more useful. The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist.

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Pressfield colorfully details the perverse satisfaction Marines derive from being more miserable than any other branch of service, from colder chow to higher casualty rates.

What does this have to do with the artist? Marines have such love for and commitment to their beloved Corps that they take pride out of the hells they endure. Same for the committed artist.

As a professional author for many years, I can promise that you’re signing up for a life of self-doubt, hardship, ridicule, rejection, uncertainty, and mind-wrecking, soul-crushing work.

There will be highs and wins (maybe), but like climbing that mountain?

98% of what you’ll do will test your commitment every single step.

Can you finish a book? Finish a book people will actually PAY to read? Can you build a brand, run a small business, understand marketing, and keep up with all the metrics and algorithms and the myriad of changes that happen seemingly by the second?

In a digital world where computing capacity has increased a trillion times since the 1950s, we humans are still trying to keep up with that puny lump of gray matter in between our ears.

Think you can keep up? Probably not. But we don’t embrace the suck because we’re certain we’ll ‘win’ or ‘have a good time.’ That’s the realm of the amateur and amateurs don’t require commitment.

As Pressfield says, ‘The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps.’

Commitment IS Uncertainty

Commitment is not a straight smooth, paved road with clear signs. There are no pitstops where some higher power, magical being posts some Things You Need to Do NEXT list.

Now wouldn’t THAT be awesome?

Certainty is a luxury that doesn’t exist. In my professional career I’ve gone from resume writer to copy writer to technical writer to screenplay writer to blogger to content editor to teacher to speaker to non-fiction author to novelist to ghostwriter. On and on, round and round, back and forth.

I turned pro right as we entered the digital age. An industry that had not changed in over a century suddenly began crumbling away. Commitment means we have to be flexible, learn to stick and move. Be willing to make hard sacrifices.

Like spending months writing a book that will never bear my name.

Staying Power

In the end, I’d like to circle back to where we began. It becomes easier to commit when we learn discernment. Commitment means we put skin in the game long enough to say we gave our best, then we can decide whether or not to remain dedicated.

Commitment is NOT a suicide pact.

Often learning what’s worthy of our life’s blood, sweat and work only comes after a process of figuring out what isn’t. Give yourselves permission to explore and maybe even *GASP* have a little fun.

Back in January, I refused to mention N** Y*** Res***tions. What can I say? 2020 was a biter. But maybe, since commitment is one of those long-term things, we could endeavor to make…New Decade Resolutions?

***Yes, I was one of those nerds who spent half my time on social media last January correcting people that 2021 actually was the first year of the new decade.

Besides, maybe New Decade Resolutions make more sense since those BIG goals take a lot of time. There will be many years where we believe we’re tilting at windmills, then BAM! It’s like the stone mason striking a large piece of granite over and over and over. It only SEEMS to crack open all at once, but it wasn’t that singular strike that did the trick. Rather, the few hundred before it in the same spot.

Anyway, as you venture out into this strange new world, remember…

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

What Are Your Thoughts?

I LOVE hearing from you! Are you like me and never understood self-discipline? I would try to change all my behavior and priorities in a day/week/month and then throw up my hands the moment I backslid.

Do you fall into all or nothing thinking? It’s okay. Even after many years training, I still have to be super careful.

Do you keep starting new projects and never finish? Even if they are ‘bad’? Find yourself almost to the finish line and gas out? When I was writing this last book, I almost had a nervous breakdown the week before I finished. I was certain it was all crap and I had to start over and was completely and utterly out of my depth.

It happens even to the best of us.

For the record, the book was far from crap and my client’s agent is over the moon! Great news for me, but how close I came to throwing in the towel, certain I was a talentless hack. Commitment to FINISH was the only way I found out any different. That I wasn’t a talentless hack at all, but quite the opposite.

Do you find yourself freezing with self-doubt? I love hearing from you. What are YOUR stories?

The post Commitment Matters: The Art of Embracing ‘The SUCK’ appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

When it comes to being successful in anything, one personal quality decimates everything else. Success doesn’t necessarily go to the rich, the talented, or even the super smart. The truly committed are who dominate the highest levels in…well, everything.

In my experience, ‘winning’ seems to have two camps.

There are those who believe in blind luck (who soon find out how fickle Lady Luck can be and wash out). Then, there are those those who appreciate that the harder/smarter they work, the luckier they’ll get.

I’ve been part of the writing world for almost two decades. Over the years, I’ve learned countless simple, yet difficult lessons and today I’ll share one of the most pivotal.

A smart person learns from his/her mistakes, but a wise person learns from the mistakes of others . And, since I’ve done all the dumb $#!@ so you don’t have to?

Let’s roll!

A Tale of Too Dumb to Live

When I was a bright-eyed neophyte, I had a lot of very strong opinions about publishing (and everything else, too).

Idiots usually do.

To be brutally honest, I was full of myself and an unteachable @$$clown. I’d grown up in a family that punished/shamed failure. If I wasn’t the ‘best,’ I’d quit. For me, it was better to drop a project, hobby or a class than to be average or—GASP—to fail.

I was so terrified of failure, I never fully committed…to anything. I’d put off papers to the last minute because, then, if I made a bad grade (a B)? I could blame my poor performance on my procrastination and super-short timeline.

If I got a job and wasn’t immediately the star performer? I’d get all butt-hurt and quit, then claim that the job wasn’t ‘right for me.’ If I started a new hobby and wasn’t an expert within the month week? I grew bored and started something ‘better.’

I was addicted to the highs of the NEW, and believed in the Santa Claus of the creative community… ‘The Muse.’ So long as my ‘new’ novel was fresh and fun and all unicorns and rainbows? I was fine.

The moment it felt like work? Hard work? That my novel de jour might even be a mess I’d have to work hard and long to fix?

#PeaceOut

Half-finished books, partially completed cross-stitch/sewing/macrame projects, unopened watercolor sets, barely used golf clubs, etc. riddled my apartment.

My closet was where hobbies and dreams went to die.

Suffice to say, I rarely committed to anything long enough to get good, let alone become an expert. I was a professional amateur.

But, don’t worry. Back then, I wasn’t one to let total ignorance stand in the way of forming super strong opinions .

Why Writers Failed

When I started out as an author, I had more than my fair share of good reasons writers (why I) failed…and time, experience and maturity have shown me how wrong I was.

This said, we still hear these good reasons writers fail to break out, and—like tales of Sasquatch or UFO abductions—far too many people believe them.

These good reasons are a distraction. They leave writers chasing windmills, which can feel like progress and meaningful action, but really add up to a lot of nothing.

Unfortunately, these writers never get to see what they might have been able to accomplish with just a sound dose of intellectual honesty.

Before we get to the gritty stuff, I need to torch some windmills. So here goes. Might wanna stand back and watch your shoes…

People Just Don’t READ Anymore

We’ve all heard this familiar lament, but how does it stand up against facts and basic logic? For most of human history the average person was completely illiterate.

Reading, like fox-hunting, polo, and wearing giant wigs in the shape of a ship was a privilege reserved for nobility and the very wealthy.

It wasn’t really until the 20th century that regular everyday people had the education, time and disposable income to read books. Before the Industrial Revolution? Books were absurdly expensive and extremely rare.

If we fast-forward to modern times, it’s easy to give this excuse for why our books aren’t selling. What with Fortnite, Netflix, The Real Housewives of Boca Raton all competing for our audiences’ attention.

Yet, strangely enough, all these other distractions haven’t stopped J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone from selling well over a hundred million copies.

Fifty Shades of Grey (as of 2015) had sold over a hundred and twenty-five million copies.

People still read. It just takes something really extraordinary (or radical/verboten) to capture their attention.

Publishers Need to Spend More on Marketing

Ads and marketing campaigns don’t sell books. Never have and never will. If you are curious why (in detail), check out THIS POST and THIS ONE or grab a copy of my branding book.

Don’t feel badly, ads and marketing campaigns don’t work well for most businesses. Sales expert Grant Cardone even mentions this in his NYTBS book If You’re Not First You’re Last—Sales Strategies to Dominate Your Market and Beat Your Competition.

Cardone reiterates a point I’ve made in countless blogs—in the current paradigm, marketing campaigns and paid advertising only seem to reinforce brands that are already household names.

We have to appreciate the sheer vastness of cyberspace. If we (writers) solely rely on marketing and ads to sell our books, we’d easily need tens of millions of dollars.

There is simply so much content on-line that to even make a blip is cost-prohibitive. Oh, and a blip isn’t a sale…so don’t get too excited.

Even IF marketing and ads alone could sell books, history has proven no amount of promotion can sell a product people don’t want or like. If massive marketing budgets alone were the key to success?

Then we’d all be drinking New Coke while driving our new 2019 Edsel and scrolling our Facebook Phone.

Writers Don’t Have Enough Training

Back in the Dark Ages (when I started writing) this could seem like a legitimate argument.

Creative writing classes and MFA programs were (are) extremely expensive. These programs seemed better designed for training future MFA professors than successful commercially published authors.

Those who didn’t go the MFA route, defaulted to the DIY plan. I remember tearing articles from issues of Writer’s Digest Magazine, checking out craft books from the library and struggling to piece the information together in a meaningful way.

Then, we had writing conferences. Conferences, though valuable (even to this day), were expensive and only held once a year per location.

Writing retreats costed thousands of dollars, thus for someone subsisting off Wendy’s .99 menu and praying the lights weren’t cut off? Not an option.

And conferences back before 2006 rarely offered classes about the business of the writing business (which was largely why I began blogging).

‘If ONLY writers had easy and affordable access to professional training,’ I lamented.

Yeah, about that.

Along comes the Internet. Though the information was sketchy in the beginning, it didn’t take long for the quality of training to improve exponentially.

Today, the web is JAM-PACKED with blogs about craft, branding, and the publishing business. We (writers) have unprecedented access to craft instruction via paper, digital, audio, video or all of the above.

Many experts offer classes that cost about the same as a Friday night dinner at Applebee’s (I know I do). There are on-line writing groups, NaNoWriMo, etc.

Yet, in spite of all of this?

The overall quality of writing has plummeted.

I’ve seen it myself. I started out as a developmental editor, and the worst samples I encountered in 2004 are easily ten times better than some of the best samples I see today.

Suffice to say, I was ridiculously naive.

Writers didn’t have a staggering failure rate because people weren’t reading, there wasn’t a big enough marketing budget, or because they couldn’t find quality training at an affordable price.

Writers failed and continue to fail because they aren’t fully committed.

Committed to FINISH

I know there are plenty of folks who write simply for a hobby, and that’s wonderful. For the record, not talking to y’all, so relax.

Plenty of writers want to know the secret to selling a ton of books. Lean in close. Want to know how to sell a lot of books?

*whispers* Finish the book.

As far as I know, there has never been a half-finished ‘perfect’ manuscript that sold millions of copies and went on to be made into a half of a ‘perfect’ HBO series.

Ah, but a lot of sucky ‘finished’ books have gone on to sell millions of copies and be made into ‘complete’ HBO seasons.

***Sucky being subjective (mostly).

Plenty of writers claim they want to be mega-authors, because NY is just publishing crap anyway, right? *hair flip*

This said, how many writers get committed? Truly committed? Like ALL IN committed? Committed to start the first book and finish it, regardless how ‘bad’ it is?

The committed understand storytelling has a learning curve. Sure, talent plays a part, but not nearly as much as we like to believe.

Committed to Go Again and Again

It takes an average of three completed manuscripts for a writer to start getting any ‘good’ at writing novels. Like anything in life, the more we practice, the better we become.

I will add in a caveat here, though.

Word count alone isn’t enough. We must be open to critique and to honest reflection. How can we do better? Improve? Repetition alone won’t cut it.

If I swing a golf club ten thousand times, that won’t make me the next Tiger Woods. It will, however, make me a prime candidate for a blown disc or three.

Same with writing. If I keep writing sucky books (and get no feedback as to why my books aren’t selling and have no reviews) then I risk getting really good at writing bad books faster. Speed is the only skill that improves if I’m unwilling to ask the hard questions.

***I do think this is a phenomena unique to the digital age, now that we have the option of self-publishing.

As we’ve talked about over the past few posts, there are a million plus books being self-published every year, and climbing.

Most novels don’t get any reviews. Others? Friends and family chime in as cheerleaders, but that isn’t always helpful for growing our skills.

These days? Claiming discoverability is a nightmare is like saying leprosy is a lot like eczema.

Thus, in the absence of helpful feedback, many writers struggle to know if their work is any good.

Not that this is a good excuse. There are ways to get a sound bead on the quality of a book. Ah, but there are so many ‘other’ reasons for failure that are far more appealing.

Lackluster sales can easily be blamed on too many other reasonable alternatives—-too many other books, algorithm issues, keyword debacles, Amazon is biased, sun spots, Mercury is in retrograde, etc.

To be blunt, most writers lean toward blaming their book’s (or books’) poor performance on anything BUT the quality of the writing.

I’ve received sample pages where the writing was SO bad I wondered if the writer even owned a copy of Strunk & White (for grammar and punctuation alone—forget story).

When I send back the pages, dripping red, what response do I most commonly get?

Oh, I see why you were confused. This sample is the beginning of Book 12 (5, 7, 18, etc.) in my series.

Yep, that was totally it. Had nothing to do with the fact that there were fifteen characters introduced by page three and each had his/her own POV (point of view).

*face palm*

Committed to Learning

When I started out? Sure I saved the articles and bought the craft books. But, I wasn’t committed to studying them and learning to write better books.

I dunno, I guess I thought owning them was enough. Maybe I thought I’d learn via osmosis or some crap.

Regardless, since I was a know-it-all? I couldn’t grow. FYI, you can’t teach a person who already knows everything.

Finally, after enough rejection, I started getting a tiny clue. Maybe I wasn’t as amazing as I believed. Tired of spinning my wheels, I hired a pro to tell me why others couldn’t see my genius what I was doing wrong.

And it went something like this:

For those who’ve been following my blog any length of time, I’ve told the story of my first critique massacre meeting. I literally sat in the parking lot and cried…as in ugly crying.

But, I’d hit a point in my life where I was tired of starting and stopping and living on emotional highs. I wanted to get committed, to see if I really had what it took to succeed…and to even be willing to see if I didn’t have what it took to succeed.

Committed to Do What Others Won’t Do

All this boils down to one core principle. If we’re in it to win it, then we have to be committed to do what others won’t.

This is true in everything. To be successful in anything we must be all in. Amateurs and wannabes try to ‘fit in time’ or ‘find the time’ to do whatever. But that isn’t how it works.

Can you imagine starting a business and ‘fitting in time’ to run that business? You do all the other things—clubs, PTA, housework, book club, yoga, taking kids to and from soccer—then pop by and open the store and hope to make money?

When I give this example, it’s easy to laugh. But wait…

How many writers (myself included) want to be top tier authors? As in household name, make loads of money and the author who gets the movie deals?

Maybe that is too much. I’ll reel it in a bit. How many writers want to sell enough copies of their books to simply write for a living? To give up that day job?

In a marketplace that’s straining to absorb a million plus NEW BOOKS per year, we cannot hope to make a scratch unless we’re all in and totally committed.

Our GOAL must be the center of our universe. Everything else orbits the goal.

When I started seeing a shift was when I stopped playing patty-cake with my goals and decided to go all in. I had to be willing to do what others wouldn’t if I hoped to breakout ahead of the masses (which is why I’ve posted over two thousand blogs, published five books, taught hundreds of classes, and spoken all over the country and now all over the world).

Despite ALL this? I can do better, or rather I must do better. The current climate demands it.

Committed to Climbing Higher

I hate to break the news, but the low-hanging fruit is all gone. Publishing is not special. Everything evolves, grows and improves. We, too, must evolve if we want to remain in the game.

Whether we want to be the best baker, the fastest runner, design the fastest car, build the tallest building, the metrics and demands are always moving up, up, up.

A hundred years ago, if you earned a degree from a university? You were set for life. Now, you’re set for an assistant manager position at Chili’s until you can earn that masters (and even then).

When I was in college, anyone who knew how to turn on a computer, let alone use one proficiently was viewed as some sort of a demigod with special knowledge.

Now? If you can’t use a computer, others want to know what hole you’ve been living in since Beverly Hills 90210 was cool.

This isn’t meant to discourage you, as much as it is to offer an honest assessment of what it takes to ding the universe. If we go into this writing thing committed to do everything it takes, KNOWING it will likely cost much more than we ever imagined or could have possibly anticipated?

Then we stand a better chance of doing well.

We can manage our expectations better and thus stave off crushing depression that might make us prematurely throw in the towel.

Our world dismisses how HARD our job really is, and as backwards as this may seem, that’s actually a compliment. See, great storytellers make what we do appear easy. Those who excel at anything make what they do seem effortless.

Top actors, athletes, salespeople, designers, bakers, artists, musicians, surgeons, illusionists, dancers, IT professionals, chefs, and carpenters ALL make their craft seem like no big deal.

We (onlookers) are merely enjoying the results/fruits from years (even decades) of remaining committed.

Committed to Commit

Why am I talking about commitment at all? Well, last post I blogged about how Amazon has now pretty much taken over publishing. I don’t expect the old paradigm publishers to remain viable for long, not that it matters.

See, the reason they contracted then crumbled was all because of a failure to commit. Or rather, they committed to the wrong things. They committed to keeping things the way they’d always been…but that’s never happened in human history.

Everything changes and evolves and we have to do so as well or end up fossils.

I get that many writers ‘just want to write’ but that’s a ridiculous statement for anyone other than the pure hobbyist. Don’t you think Beyonce might ‘just want to sing’? That Tom Brady might ‘just want to have fun and toss around the pig skin?’

If you get to know the top-earning authors, they work their tails off doing more than ‘just writing.’

Committed to ‘Just Writing’

Let’s take branding, social media, training, and business out of all this for the moment. I cannot count how many times I’ve heard writers lament they ‘just wanted to write’.

Okay…DO THAT. Today. Write five pages a day no matter what.

***For the record, I’m taking this challenge up as well so y’all are not alone.

Stephen King writes roughly six pages every day, except for his birthday. Dean Koontz, initially, wrote at a typewriter sixty hours a week. Isaac Asimov wrote sixteen hours a day. On and on.

From J.K. Rowling to Neil Gaiman to Ray Bradbury we see that, while all these authors have a unique pace and approach, they’re consistent. They write. Day after day they get words on the page. They’re committed.

We can learn a lot from that.

As for Moi?

Now that I’m finishing up here? Going to take my own advice and complete the edits for Dead Line. This was a short mystery-suspense that was published as part of a box set in 2017.

I have rights back and am re-releasing it on my own. I’m also…*shaky breath* committed to finishing the next book in my Romi Lachlan series by December.

I’ve spent far too long putting off what should have been a priority.

See? I struggle with the same stuff! I’ve just learned to be honest with myself. Every day is a chance to do it better. We’re not perfect and never will be. Just live, learn, dust off and do better.

Get committed!

COMING SOON

Dead Line is set in the same town as my mystery-thriller The Devil’s Dance.

What are your thoughts? I LOVE hearing from YOU!

Hey, I KNOW how tough this job is. We ALL struggle, which is why we have to get up DAILY and prioritize what we want out of life. I have to remember that laundry, dishes, organizing my sock drawer are necessary chores…but they aren’t the PRIORITY.

Do you need to get committed to your writing? Have you been more committed to scrolling Facebook and feeling overwhelmed than to simply writing the story DOWN?

Is your brain in knots worrying over how to sell books you haven’t even FINISHED? Mine is. Or was. Hey, we are all works in progress .

A Quick Announcement

For anyone who wants to meet me in person, I’d LOVE to meet YOU (unless you don’t like me and then don’t you need to clean out those closets? #JustSayin).

Now that my parole officer finally agreed to extend the range of my ankle monitor…I’ll be speaking ALL DAY at these two incredible events!

…yes, they DO know it’s me. RIGHT? Anyway…

Y’all can check out Facebook for more details.

Right after Houston, I’ll be zooming to the other side of Texas to keynote for the Permian Basin Writers’ Conference. Come join the fun! We’ll talk shop, play with duct tape and glitter, and maybe get kicked out of a Walmart.

It’ll be FABULOUS! (Note: Bail money not included in conference fee).

The post In It to WIN It: How Committed Are You to Being a Successful Author? appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

It’s Cait Reynolds blog time, which, as you know, is probably both a blessing and a curse. Haven’t blogged for a while but, it’s like the old Country & Western song: How Can I Miss You if You Won’t Go Away? But yes, I’m back which might be a blessing or a curse.

Speaking of curses, that’s what I’m here to talk about today.

Writers tend to be a superstitious bunch, much like runners. Even the most skeptical among us can tell when the stars are not aligned on a writing day. Runners can feel when their bodies just aren’t hitting on all cylinders.

From drinking the same tea while writing to wearing lucky socks for race day, many of us can’t help but look for and cling to signs/omens/Tarot readings for encouragement.

Because we ALL need encouragement.

But, sometimes, there comes a moment when it feels like all the forces of nature are against us. No amount of stretching our prose or IT bands seems to make any difference. It’s positively spooky how blocked we get.

Now, living in Boston and being both a runner and a Red Sox fan, I consider myself something of an expert in curses. I mean, it took Bruce Springsteen’s rock n’ roll exorcism during his concert at Fenway Park to lift the curse of the Bambino…and that year, we finally won the World Series.

You can’t tell me that ish doesn’t work.

Do you know how hard it was to find funny Boston memes without the f-bomb for this post? DO YOU?!! DO YOU F*$#@*&* APPRECIATE WHAT I DO FOR YOU????!!!!

I also happen to be descended from a long line of eerily prescient/omniscient/ohnoshedidn’t Slavic women who can look right into your soul and see you didn’t wash your hands after using the public restroom.

Yeah. I know my curses.

Now, settle in, my loves. Ignore the goat demon in the corner. He’s harmless. Mostly. Oh, and careful with the salt circle. Summoning with a smudged salt circle can be…messy.

29 and Feeling Fine

Like all curses, the Mile 25 Curse begins with the seduction of possibility, invincibility, and a good pair of running shoes.

We get the Big Idea. Get all excited, develop characters, settings, plot, outlines. When we jump in, it’s both feet first and hit the ground running like we are our very own NaNoWriMo on meth.

The words are flowing. It’s easy. Effortless. This time…this time is gonna be different. We’re going to ride that wave of effortless all the way through to THE END. It’s just gonna flow.

It’s like that first run, when we blast our way through 1.5 miles at a blistering 14:06/mi pace. Hardcore, man.

We blow through the first 29,000-30,000 words of a full-length novel in record time. And it’s good work. Some of our best. We’re in it to win it, and this is rocking!

We’ve reached the end of Act I, and now, our characters are on their way. Only, the yellow brick road turns out to be paved with the broken backs of melting Peeps, and now, we’re running on a road that’s slow, sticky, and somewhat distressing.

Welcome to HELL…or Act II. Too many writers mistakenly believe writing a novel is a sprint or a fun run. No, it’s a marathon that requires training, preparations, patience and a very high pain tolerance.

Because all novelists will eventually hit…

The Heartbreak Hill of the WIP

But hey, we’ve got a plan. We’ve got an outline. The fresh idealism of the first 30,000 words has worn off, but we kinda knew this was going to happen. We had hoped it wouldn’t. But, it did. Just like we wish training for a 10k simply felt like training for two 5ks…but it’s sooo not.

So, it’s not totally shocking, and while it may take a few days to resign ourselves to the fact Act II will always be a slower, harder slog, we’re ready to soldier on.

The first stirrings of real unease might pop up around 40,000-45,000 words. We feel a little proud we’ve gotten this far. That’s a lot of words, probably around a halfway point for the whole book.

It’s also the Heartbreak Hill of our story.

Heartbreak Hill is the cruelest mile of the Boston Marathon. It’s a steady 3.3% incline for more than 2 km. Now, that may not seem like much, but remember, runners have already done 20.6 miles. There have been shorter, steeper climbs and longer, quad-punishing downhills.

Boston Marathon sign at Heartbreak Hill

Runners are caked in salt, blood, and sticky dried Gatorade. It could be beating down icy rain or unseasonably hot. Healed injuries are tweaking, threatening to unravel. The playlist is failing to inspire. Even the kisses and oranges from the Wellesley College girls (both offered freely to all) can’t quite distract from the pain.

All the cowbell in the world can’t help you now.

2014 Boston Marathon: the famous Wellesley kissing line.

Wellesley College student Lauren Dow solicited and RECEIVED kisses from the passing runners. Section: Sports, Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff

Writers and runners slow and walk a few steps, cry a little, then grit their teeth and get back in the game. Because it’s only 5.6 miles or 45,000 words to the finish line. This is the hardest test of what we are made of. Can we ENDURE?

We got this….*weeps*

The Mile 25 Curse

I used to live right at mile 25 of the Boston Marathon, which is just before Kenmore Square (mile 25.2), where the crowds really start going wild. From Kenmore, it’s just one more mile to the finish line.

But there’s one last nasty surprise for runners. To get to Kenmore Square, they have to run over the I-90 overpass, a mini-Heartbreak Hill. It’s the psych-out sucker punch. CURSE it ALL!

Boston Marathon sign

For writers, that moment of despair generally comes at the end of Act II, or about 60,000 words-ish. It’s a sudden existential inadequacy and dread:

Oh-my-God-this-is-the-worst-stuff-I’ve-ever-written-what-was-I-thinking-is-it-too-late-to-take-up-Olympic-curling-as-a-career-instead-who-would-want-to-read-this-crap-I-suck-as-a-writer-I-should-just-go-crawl-in-a-hole-and-die.

You know…something like that.

Every writer faces a Mile 25 Curse moment. There are no talismans to protect us against it, no surefire cures. We are alone and unprepared to face our demons. Every. Single. Time.

The Mile 25 Curse can make us abandon our WIP to chase fluffy plot bunnies that PROMISE to be easier to write and give us instant fame, fortune, and a lifetime supply of Diet Coke.

The curse doesn’t care if our WIP is any good. It doesn’t care about our dreams. It has one goal: to trip us up before the finish line.

There are runners who collapse at mile 25 in the Boston Marathon, physically and mentally pushed beyond their limit. There are also the runners who slow to a walk as they digest the grim reality of one last hill. You can see them weighing the options in their heads. Should I just give up and walk the rest of the way? Do I have it in me?

How badly do I want this?

They take a deep breath…and resume running, even if it’s merely a limping jog. No way they’ve come this far to just give up.

So, they just keep running.

The Finish Line

And, really, that’s what I’m trying to tell you today. Keep pressing. Mile 25 is a finite thing. It is one mile…or 5,280 ft….or 1,500 steps, and each step brings you that much closer to the finish line.

Spencer the Boston Marathon dog will cheer you on!

When we are at the end of Act II, there isn’t that much further to go. It’s another 15,000-20,000 words at most for Act III. We know how the story is going to end (or should) and what needs to happen. There’s no more slogging through the confusing, mushy bits we’re not sure of in Act II.

This is a final sprint for the FINISH!

A marathon is about crossing the finish line. It isn’t about sashaying, moon-walking, or pronking across it. How we cross doesn’t matter. We simply have to cross it, limping, bloody, and shaking from way too much caffeine after writing the worst 12,000 words of our lives.

Nobody looks good crossing the finish line of a race. Even the 100-meter dash–sure, it’s not far enough that hair and makeup get mussed, but there’s the awkward ‘runner face’ everyone makes, which is halfway between the putting-on-mascara face and the O-face.

Not even Kenyans look their best at a finish line.

I have yet to finish a book and wake up the next morning looking like a million dollars. It’s more that I look like a reject extra for The Walking Dead. I probably smell like a reject extra from The Walking Dead, too, because who has time to shower when we’re 4,000 from the finish line?

The point is, it doesn’t matter if you are sweaty, blotchy, puffy, a drippy mess from allergies, or prone to random hysterical laughter by the time you finish your book. YOU FINISHED.

And as a fellow writer and perhaps a fellow runner…I’ll be there to cheer you on!

Coach Cait is ready! (Post-run on a GOOD day)

***

Thank You CAIT!

Kristen here. If anyone ever sees me running? RUN FOR YOUR $%#@#$% LIFE! Because there is something with teeth or a chainsaw behind me.

But, whether we are runners or not, writing is an endurance sport. I choose motherhood, grappling in Jiu Jitsu, and time with my mother to train my endurance. It helps .

***Scroll down for new classes from Cait and for On Demand classes for hardcore storytelling training from MOI!

What Are Your Thoughts?

I love hearing from you!

Do you find yourself starting and never finishing? Is this from lack of planning? Failing to fully prepare? Not enough training? Maybe underestimating HOW FREAKING HARD writing a novel ACTUALLY is?

Are you being too hard on yourself? A commenter last time was really down she couldn’t finish her FIRST ‘novel.’ Hell, it took me no less than FIFTEEN ‘novels’ before I finished. That whole ‘endurance training thing’ .

What do you WIN? For the month of MAY, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

Also NOW OFFERING MORE CLASSES PLUS ON DEMAND…

Retelling Myths & Fairytales

Instructor: USA Today Best-Selling Author Cait Reynolds
Price: $65 USD Standard (Cool Upgrades Available)
Where: W.A.N.A. Digital Classroom
When: FRIDAY May 25th, 7:00 PM E.S.T. to 9:00 P.M. EST

Myths and fairytales are as fundamental to human existence as communication itself. We grow up hearing these stories, being formed by them, and often rebelling against them.

One of the hottest trends in publishing right now is bringing these stories back and giving them new life with creative interpretations and retellings.

Done right, a retelling can capture the public imagination, give us new insights into our society and ourselves, and sweep us away to a time and place where everything, including justice and happy endings, is possible. Get your spot today! HERE.

The Yarn Behind the Book: Backstory

Instructor: Cait Reynolds

Price: $55.00 USD

Where: W.A.N.A. Digital Classroom

When: Friday, June 1, 2018. 7:00-9:00 p.m. EST

Behind every good book is an entire story that happens before the reader ever opens to page one. This is the backstory, and done right, it is what sets the stage, provides clues and cues, and rescues you from writer’s block.

A good backstory will help with logic and consistency in the plot, developing complex motivations for characters, and sorting out exactly what needs to happen going forward as you either plot or pants your way to the end.

This class will cover the following topics – and much more:

• The elements of a backstory;
• How to take your current plot idea and work backwards into a backstory;
• Integrating character profiles and the backstory;
• How the backstory relates to the logline and synopsis;
• Using the backstory to dig yourself out of corners and shake off writer’s block;
• Why a backstory is crucial to writing a series.

A recording of this class is also included with purchase.

About the Instructor:

Cait Reynolds is a USA Today Bestselling Author and lives in the Boston area with her husband and neurotic dog. She discovered her passion for writing early and has bugged her family and friends with it ever since. When she isn’t cooking, running, or enjoying the rooftop deck that brings her closer to the stars, she writes.

On Demand Training!

Ready for Book Beast Mode? I Live to Serve…Up Some TRAINING!

For anyone who longs to accelerate their plot skills, I recommend:

ON DEMAND Plot Boss: Writing Novels Readers Want to BUY. 

Two hours of intensive plot training from MOI…delivered right to your computer to watch as much as you like .

The Art of Character is also now available for ON DEMAND.

And if you’re ready for BOOK BEAST MODE and like saving some cash, you can get BOTH Plot Boss and Art of Character in the…

Story Boss Bundle (ON DEMAND).

Almost FIVE HOURS with me, in your home…lecturing you. It’ll be FUN! 

I also hope you’ll pick up a copy of my debut novel The Devil’s Dance.

The post The Writer’s Marathon & The Curse of Heartbreak Hill appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

For most of my life, being ‘right’ was my single greatest priority. Years ago, I believed I knew everything. Okay, that’s a lie. More like a couple weeks ago I believed I knew everything.

More lies. Dang it!

Truth is, this morning I knew everything then got some caffeine and realized I was completely full of it. It takes work for me to stop and ask the hard questions daily to keep me grounded.

What if I’m wrong? Why am I really doing X? What is my motive? Am I afraid of something? Do I really believe what I’m saying I believe? Where are my pants?

Calm down.

I don’t spend vast amounts of time gazing into my navel searching for the Lint of Truth…especially since everyone knows the dryer has the Lint of Truth (left by socks who’ve achieved enlightenment and thus shed corporeal form).

#Duh

Self-examination is still important. Alas, it’s also a tricky tightrope to walk, and takes years of practice not to fall on your head with a pole jammed somewhere painful.

We can lean toward questioning everything so much we become paralyzed neurotics incapable of making any decision. Conversely, if we don’t stop to examine what we’re doing and why? Let’s just say…

Persistence is a noble quality, but persistence can look a lot like stupid.

The Priority Problem

If I could boil down the essence of modern human angst into one core idea, I’d say we’re all facing a priority problem. We’re being relentlessly told we can have it ALL, when no…no we can’t.

I’m from Generation X, and people my age have lived fully in two completely different worlds. We were the bridge generation from the industrial world into the digital world. We played the first video games, but also remember being…bored.

I’m old enough to recall a time when if you missed a T.V. show, well sucked to be you. Television stopped at midnight only to resume at 5:00 a.m. with morning news, faith healers, and Captain Kangaroo.

Back in my day *waves cane* the phone would ring and we had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA who might be calling. The highlight of my preteen life? When I got a phone cord long enough to extend the ENTIRE PHONE SYTEM UNIT into my room.

Cordless phones? Witchcraft.

I mostly played outside in the dirt. We slinked through barbed wire to traipse through rattlesnake infested fields searching for buried treasure—finding only fire ants, rusted tools, and the joy of bull nettle.

Under my cult-leader-type influence, we set way too much stuff on fire (using that Chemistry set I got for my birthday). Being a super non-PC generation, we killed a lot of imaginary Russians, made ashtrays in art class for Mother’s Day, and we all wanted to be Bruce Lee.

***True Fact #1: Once knocked myself out with nunchucks. True Fact #2: Eventually got pretty good at nunchucks. True Fact #3: We all wanted ninja throwing stars for Christmas, and 98% of parents did not find this at all odd.

Yet, I also played a lot of Atari. I even created multiple small business ventures using child labor (little brother and friends). We pulled weeds, washed cars, picked up dog poop all to score enough cash to imbibe in Pac Man and ice cream at the corner store….

Until we ran out of money and the clerk kicked us out. Then we had to resume being bored.

In school, teachers introduced us to computers that didn’t do much of anything useful…except allow us to die of digital dysentery.

Life was comparably simple for kids and adults. Get up, do your job, stay out of trouble, and go to bed. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Mom was awesome keeping up with bills because there were only like…five of them. Television had three channels. People didn’t expect you to be accessible 24/7. If you called and no one answered?

You called…back.

Later.

Overload

Contrast my life in 1988 with 2018? It takes everything for me not to pack up and move to Alaska. Except I’m too lazy to pack, hate being cold and never developed a taste for moose.

But seriously. Not only are we bombarded with calls, ads, emails, real mail and junk mail, but we can’t seem to escape.

Ever.

Which is not exactly what’s so bad. What’s insane is we believe there’s a way to actually keep up with all this crap. But we can’t, because our world isn’t real.

When I was a kid, I spent time at other kids’ houses daily. Not BS ‘play dates’ where everyone dresses in ‘real clothes’ and cleans the house like it’s friggin’ Thanksgiving. All this so two sticky kids can whack each other with Jedi light-sabers that LOOK like actual light-sabers…instead of a stick.

The on-line world is filtered. Since websites thrive when people click, only the extremes are ever represented. Extremes get more clicks.

We’re deluged with the extremely beautiful, thin, fit, smart, talented and the teenager who’s now a billionaire because he invented an app that makes a thousand unique fart noises.

On the other end of this spectrum sits the nine-hundred pound man, the hoarder whose home is crammed with toaster pizzas and feral cats, and the dude who believes he’s really a unicorn and suffers profoundly because he needs an implant (a horn) in his forehead to feel ‘whole.’

I have no idea what should be important when everything is important.

I’m supposed to make millions of dollars, write books that fundamentally change the global culture, never age, have six-pack abs, a perfect marriage, rescue animals, save the rainforest, all while keeping a house so clean one could perform surgery in my bathroom.

The bathroom I refurbished myself using recycled tires, wire hangars, and wooden pallets. All held together with unenlightened dryer lint and non-GMO, vegan, eco-friendly glue I made…in my ‘free’ time.

Priority? Save the planet THEN show off on Faceplant, Flitter, Sintrest and Instasham.

Busy, Busy, Busy

I’m from the buckle of the Bible Belt and we have a saying. If the devil can’t make you bad, he’ll make you busy.

I’ve noticed that, unless I am mindful to unplug, get quiet and recalibrate, it is super easy for me to lose my way. Why? Everything is overwhelming. I hate my phone, am afraid of my mail and won’t shop until we’re down rationing toilet paper.

Every store is a mega-store with a zillion choices. This means I go all white girl and ‘literally can’t even.’

As an introvert, I’d choose being water-boarded to shopping. This puzzled me, but then I thought about how it was when I was a kid in the 80s. Stores were smaller and there weren’t a hundred choices in pasta sauce.

Michael’s (a craft store) was the size of a CVS (corner drug store). By the time I wended through sixty-two aisles to find ONE pair of knitting needles, it was time to go to Costco…which is the size of an aircraft hangar.

Then there’s the grocery store (for the stuff I don’t want to buy in BULK) and it has fifty aisles which include toys, clothing, and shoes.

SHOES? IT IS A GROCERY STORE.

Sure, I went out to do five things. By the time I got home (nine hours later) I’d walked seven miles. I was exhausted from the mental onslaught of trying to pick between seventy-five varieties of gluten-free rice. All these stores, in order to provide everything and save time…are the largest time-killers I must contend with.

Though if I grew my own tomatoes this wouldn’t be a problem. TP is a definite priority, yet a tad more challenging. Corn cobs? Maybe grow corn, too.

Priority Parallax

Objects on ‘To Do List’ might actually appear more important than they really are. When everything is a priority, nothing is. Ironically, I actually don’t engage in a lot of social media, which is weird because I’m an expert and write blogs and books about it.

Yet, unlike other experts who claim we must be everywhere all the time and endlessly entertaining (and promoting), my priority is to write more books, not be a mega-marketer.

It’s why I created a social media/branding system based on quality, with a focus on meaningful interactions. Author engagement over author omnipresence. A brand is vital and so is social media, but our PRIORITY is to build a brand and still have time to write great books.

But social media isn’t the only place insanity can take over. I can have a Pinterest worthy home…or go to jail for murdering my family. Life is about choices and I’m pretty sure prison white not my color (and I’d miss my family).

Every day is a habit or waking, taking QUIET time to reflect, then whittling everything down to what TRULY matters.

Because ‘having everything’ is playing life like Pac Man instead of chess.

In Pac Man you never win. It just gets faster and faster and harder and harder UNTIL YOU DIE. Chess? There is strategy, patience, willingness to ‘let go’ of even ‘important’ pieces to protect the most crucial one. In chess, you CAN actually win!

Go fig.

Entropy is real and alive and a beast in the digital age. Much we can’t control. Trust me. Target gives no figs I really don’t want eighty aisles of STUFF…especially when they only ever have two checkout lanes open, despite having forty.

*wonders if thirty-eight of the registers are real or props*

Only So Many Figs to Give—If It Isn’t TRULY a Priority?

We might want to have everything, but everything is a lie. We can’t make all things a priority because then, well…welcome to Hell’s Tilt-A-Whirl.

Back to those crucial questions I mentioned in the beginning? If we’re exhausted, strung out, and feeling like losers, it’s time to stop for a priority check (and a dose of reality).

The media is a lousy measuring guide because we will never be enough. If we were, they couldn’t sell us more STUFF. They sell us crap we don’t need by making us feel like losers, that we are missing out on the AMAZING…when we really aren’t.

Most of life is in the average. We’re only capable of being remarkable in a couple places. Why? Because being remarkable takes focus and a LOT of hard work. So choose the PRIORITY, then learn to be cool with the rest.

My home is clean…enough. It’s covered in cat fur but that’s because I value my pets more than the opinion of others. If they don’t like the cat fur, feel free to come over and clean. I’ll cook .

A final caveat on this? If I want my writing to be exemplary, where does it rank on my ‘list?’ Is it a priority? Since I’m OCD and a neat-freak, I know NOT to clean anything until I write. I must do this because my PRIORITY is to be a superlative author/blogger, NOT Martha Stewart for an hour before my kid and cats destroy everything.

If my writing keeps ending up at the END of my list, more hard questions.

Why am I procrastinating? What am I afraid of? Is my writing always last because I believe I don’t have what it takes? Remember noble distractions can mask as priorities.

Obviously I’m not finished with my novel because my family needed help with *insert crisis here*. Clearly family is a PRIORITY.

Maybe. But might want to do a gut check just in case .

What Are Your Thoughts? Then GET OFF MY LAWN!

Do you feel guilty about doing NOTHING? Struggle to get of the hamster wheel of To Dos? Does it seem like the ‘easier’ our world tries to make life the harder it gets? Is it an active effort to keep priorities in line? Do you find your writing constantly put off for…later?

Do you miss being unavailable? And people not being ticked off because you were unavailable? Sigh. What do you miss about the ‘good old days’? I get it, modern life does have a lot of good, but I do miss having nothing to do.

Have a hard time doing anything for yourself? Because it feels too selfish. Once EVERYONE else is tended, THEN…maybe…

There are cool classes below if you want to have fun honing your skills. Otherwise? Feel free not to scroll down . Working to make this easy, y’all.

I love hearing from you!

What do you WIN? For the month of MAY, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

Also NOW OFFERING MORE CLASSES…

Hooked!

Instructor: Kristen Lamb
Price: $40.00 USD Basic/$65.00 USD Gold Level/$95.00 USD Platinum Level
Where: WANA Virtual Classroom
When: Thursday May 10th, 2018 7:00 PM E.S.T. to 9:00 PM E.S.T.

The first five pages are the most essential part of the novel, your single most powerful selling tool. It’s how you will hook agents, editors and readers. This class will cover the most common blunders and also teach you how to hook hard and hook early. This class is two hours long, 90 minutes of instruction and 30 minutes for Q&A.

***A free recording is included with purchase of ALL classes.

General Admission is $40 and there are some SUPER COOL upgrades! Get your spot HERE

Retelling Myths & Fairytales

Instructor: USA Today Best-Selling Author Cait Reynolds
Price: $65 USD Standard (Cool Upgrades Available)
Where: W.A.N.A. Digital Classroom
When: FRIDAY May 25th, 7:00 PM E.S.T. to 9:00 P.M. EST

Myths and fairytales are as fundamental to human existence as communication itself. We grow up hearing these stories, being formed by them, and often rebelling against them.

One of the hottest trends in publishing right now is bringing these stories back and giving them new life with creative interpretations and retellings.

Done right, a retelling can capture the public imagination, give us new insights into our society and ourselves, and sweep us away to a time and place where everything, including justice and happy endings, is possible. Get your spot today! HERE.

On Demand Training!

Ready for Book Beast Mode? I Live to Serve…Up Some TRAINING!

For anyone who longs to accelerate their plot skills, I recommend:

ON DEMAND Plot Boss: Writing Novels Readers Want to BUY. 

Two hours of intensive plot training from MOI…delivered right to your computer to watch as much as you like .

The Art of Character is also now available for ON DEMAND.

And if you’re ready for BOOK BEAST MODE and like saving some cash, you can get BOTH Plot Boss and Art of Character in the…

Story Boss Bundle (ON DEMAND).

Almost FIVE HOURS with me, in your home…lecturing you. It’ll be FUN! 

I also hope you’ll pick up a copy of my debut novel The Devil’s Dance.

The post The Priority Parallax: Everything is Not as Important as It Appears appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Permission. This might seem an odd word to discuss when it comes to success, but we need to hash out some dos and don’ts before January 1st. New Year’s resolutions are often more about taking freedoms away instead of permitting new ones. In my opinion, this is why a lot of well-intended changes fail to stick, but that’s for another post .

I’m a HUGE fan of discipline, though admittedly, I’m definitely a work in progress. I confess that, in my drive to be disciplined, I can become rigid, legalistic, and ridiculously hard on myself if I’m not careful.

The trick (as in most endeavors) is finding balance. Balance is and can only be achieved with granting ourselves the right kinds of permission. These permissions are especially vital if we hope to achieve success as authors.

Permission to Be New

Last post we discussed the writers’ journey from newbie to mastery. This ‘permission to be new’ might seem like an easy one. Do NOT be fooled. This permission might very well be the toughest of all. Why? Because our world has a perception problem.

From a novel, to a movie to an HBO series, the audience is ALWAYS witnessing the final product. They’re enjoying the cumulation of countless hours (or years) of work and the efforts of more than one person.

Even with a novel, audiences don’t stop to think that 99% of authors are not, in fact, publishing their first draft. They also don’t realize that FINAL draft came to fruition with outside assistance (editors & proofreaders).

Yes, there are novelists who claim they publish their first drafts, but (aside perhaps from some anomalous savant) they don’t. Not really. Often this I-only-publish-first-draft-novelist writes an excruciatingly detailed outline which they slash, correct, rearrange, etc. THEN they write the novel. Thus, technically, the outline was draft 1-50.

Also there are writers like Dean Koontz. He writes X amount of pages a day and never revises. But, Koontz wrote a gazillion books using many methods until he was so well-trained he could do this ‘magic.’ Remember, though, that even the great Dean Koontz was once new.

Thus expect the world won’t understand why you’re not richer than J.K. Rowling a month after you finish the first draft of your first novel. They’re outsiders who don’t ‘get’ our craft, that it IS a craft with an actual learning curve like um…learning to play an instrument.

People generally don’t appreciate that even J.K. Rowling was a single mother on welfare rejected by more than a dozen publishers. Even her first (reluctant) publisher actively encouraged her to get a ‘real’ job.

Permission to ‘Suck’

This permission goes hand-in-hand with being new, but permission to ‘suck’ is one we’re wise to keep our entire career. Getting words on the page is the most important part of the job. No ‘great idea’ for a book ever became a New York Times best-seller. I cannot recall any half-finished ‘perfect’ manuscript ever becoming a runaway success, but plenty ‘meh’ finished ones have.

And no, I can’t explain it either. There are more than fifty shades of why audience tastes are vastly unpredictable. Suffice to say, the world doesn’t reward perfectionists, it rewards finishers.

Also, be aware that sometimes we’re not the best judge of our own work. We could be tired, have a hormone out of place, woke up too early to the cat puking on the carpet SIX INCHES FROM TILE and we’re hypercritical. Everything word is dreadful, tedious, and pure tripe. Our characters are one-dimensional tropes and a hamster with a traumatic head injury could’ve concocted a better plot.

Face it. We’re loathsome poseur hacks who don’t deserve access to Word…or even to live.

Um, eat a Snickers and take a nap. Then keep writing and resist the urge to edit. There are GOOD REASONS WHY this is a dangerous time to edit.

Odds are you’ll look back in revisions and realize you were being a drama queen. Imperfection is where the true beauty of story resides.

Even if the WIP does need to be ‘fixed’ you’re more likely to fix it, not SMITE it. You’ll actually edit and revise instead of going all Old Testament burning to ash, poisoning wells, then salting the earth….after characters wiped out by Backspace Death.

Permission to Write

First of all, it is perfectly acceptable to write as a hobby and for fun and not to be paid. I crochet. Additionally, I kind of suck at crocheting, but I enjoy it and it relaxes me. My scarves are pretty enough *shrugs*. I’ve ‘mastered’ ONE stitch in four years. Be assured, you will never see my creations for sale for big bucks or any bucks on Etsy because it’s a hobby.

I don’t desire to crochet products consumers would pay money to wear. This means I can put it off until I feel like crocheting. I also can be more laissez-faire with what the final product looks like, because crocheting is NOT my profession.

If, however, we desire to make a living as an author, then this ‘writing thing’ is our job/profession.

Being an author might be a second or even third job, but it IS a job—a ‘real’ one. Writing isn’t our hobby or our ‘little thing’ and it merits serious priority. Laundry, toilets, and figuring out how to get gummy worms out of the XBox can wait or be delegated.

For more on this, I strongly recommend you read one of my older posts Good Girls Don’t Become Best-Sellers (applies to Nice Guys, too, btw).

Permission to Fail

Show me a person who’s never failed and I’ll show you someone who’s never done anything interesting. Afraid to fail? Good, welcome to being human. In my vast experience, only talentless hacks steeped in self-delusion believe all they write is gold.

There’s a balance. Simpering, spineless slackers are as useless as narcissistic, unteachable, know-it-alls. Our goal is to find a happy place in the middle of this bell curve. We should be open to criticism, suggestions and growth while simultaneously being confident and knowledgable enough to know when to stand our ground (lest we end up with a book-by committee).

Humans are wired to learn by failing. Our brains are literally designed to learn by trial and error, which is why I’m adamantly opposed to chastising kids for failing.

I firmly believe our culture’s over fascination with the ‘born genius’ and ‘naturally gifted/talented’ is TOXIC. Kids mistakenly believe if they don’t do whatever ‘perfectly’ the first time or at least super quickly, then there’s something wrong with them. This then carries into adulthood.

Failure shaming, in my POV, generates underachievement (afraid to even try, low self-image) or neurotic perfectionism (hiding oopses, overworking, septic overachievement, terror regarding asking for help). I know because I was reared to be terrified of failing.

This is why as an adult and a MOM, I make sure that failure is embraced and celebrated in our home. Failure is an event, not an identity. I want my son to understand mistakes are stepping stones on the road of progress.

Another reason we’re wise to grant ourselves permission to fail, is a that ‘failure’ isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, failure can actually be a happy accident in disguise.

Two words: Ivory Soap.

Permission to Succeed

To succeed, strangely we must give ourselves permission to win. Bizarre, right? Mmmmmm, not so much.

Fear of failure and fear of success are frequently linked and this paradox could be a blog (or book) on its own. It seems stupid for people to fear success. Yet, many do and for a multitude of reasons. First, humans generally dislike change. Success means massive change. We might feel we are ill-prepared to traverse such unknown territory. We fear what we don’t know and places we’ve never been.

We could also worry that, if we succeed, we might not be able to duplicate whatever it was that brought us ‘success’ in the first place. That we’re a fake, a fraud and never actually ‘earned’ the win.

Perhaps now it’s a tad clearer why fear of success and failure are linked.

There’s another reason many of us fear success, one I haven’t seen discussed much. This manifestation is most common for those brought up in a dysfunctional home/background. We are afraid to be happy and our fear of success is linked to a version of PTSD. Always waiting for the ‘other shoe to drop’ so to speak.

For folks who’ve been through trauma, our brains often cannot discern healthy excitement/arousal felt when experiencing success from the anxiety/arousal before ‘the bad thing’ to come. Our brain believes all ‘arousal’ is bad, thus super scary and to be avoided at all costs. This means when we get close to ‘winning’ we might self-sabotage to alleviate the nerve-shredding anxiety.

It takes some retraining of the old gray matter, but it’s worth it. Yes, give permission to succeed. I know I’m not the only one out there who’s self-sabotaged, procrastinated, or up and quit because I was wracked with fear I couldn’t explain. Trust me, I was as mystified as everyone around me until I understood what was causing this behavior.

It’s okay. Being messed up generally makes for better writers .

What Are Your Thoughts?

As long as I’ve been at this, I still struggle to some degree with all five of these. Permission to write and to succeed are still the biggies. I struggle with guilt that I’m writing when there is so much laundry to do and drawers to sort and on and on. Additionally, I still procrastinate when I might just succeed because I already admitted I’m messed up and that writing is cheaper than therapy

What about you guys? Gonna ‘fess up and be brave? Are you too hard on yourself? Self-sabotage? Petrified of failing? Ashamed of being new? It’s okay, we are all in the same boat here .

Hey, there are goodies involved for being bold…

I love hearing from you and am not above bribery!

What do you WIN? For the month of DECEMBER, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

ALSO, NEW CLASS! 

The Art of Character: How to Craft Dimensional ‘People’ in Fiction

Instructor: Kristen Lamb
Price: $45 USD (Only $36 with discount)
Where: W.A.N.A. Digital Classroom
When: January 4th, 2018 7:00 P.M. EST—9:00 P.M. EST

No matter what genre we write, the key to writing unforgettable stories always rests with character. How do we create intriguing characters who hook readers and never let them go? What makes a character unforgettable? How do we write stories that endure?

It is easy to fall into tropes and caricatures if we lack a fundamental understanding of human nature and how this plays out in the dramatic narrative. This class will delve into how to add depth to our characters which will, in turn add, resonance with our plot.

This class will cover:

• Discovering Wounds;
• Understanding Coping Mechanisms;
• How Wounds Collide to Increase Dramatic Tension
• How to Create Dimensional Characters
• Using Character to Plot

***A FREE recording is included with purchase.

The post 5 Areas We Need Permission for Success appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Today I have on my sassy pants because there’s a messy task ahead. Oh it will be a TON of fun, but messy. We are going to tip over some sacred cows like how fun is evil and misery is awesome.

Granted I am from Texas and have heard stories of those miscreants who’ve sneaked (snuck? snucked?) in under cover of darkness to traipse across pastures littered with steaming cow poo…for the sheer joy of pushing over sleeping bovines.

I, myself, have never indulged in this innocent mischief and remain dubious this “cow-tipping” thing is even real. But supposedly the boogeyman isn’t real and yet–even as an adult–I never sleep with a foot off the edge of the bed.

#AreUCrazy

I can’t see how tipping over innocent cows could be half the fun we hear it is, but I assure you tipping these sacred cows?

LOADS of FUN.

Sacred Cow #1—Fun=Ineffective Time-Waster

Remember being a kid and it was actually okay to have fun? Then something weird happened in adolescence and everything got super serious. Teens of course have hormones and the whole “forging a distinctive identity” thing to blame, not to mention *ugh* high school.

But what is our excuse?

As kids we longed to grow up, to be ADULTS, so we could be…FREE.

About that. We humans are weird.

Give us anything that might liberate us and make life BETTER, and we will quickly turn it into a soul-sucking chore. It is simply astounding all the stuff that is fun…that we RUIN.

Bear with me.

We might start at the gym because we know going for a walk is good for us. We also know the gym is climate controlled so we won’t be able to use rain or sun or wind as an excuse to not get some exercise.

We start walking and feeling better. Yay, lower back feels great. Thirty minutes. Happy endorphins and we are very proud of what we have done.

We bask in the glow of our one month of walking five days a week for thirty minutes. In fact, we feel this self-discipline thing really isn’t so hard at all!

THEN…

A personal trainer notices we’ve been at the gym regularly and steps in to…help.

DON’T FALL FOR IT! IT’S A TRICK!

Sacred Cow #2—TRUST the “Experts”

Mere moments earlier, we felt AWESOME, only now realize how misguided we were. Oh, thank goodness this expert saved us from destruction!

The trainer, deeply concerned for our welfare tells us with all kinds of statistics and studies that our silly walking is not enough.

No, we must add in weight training. Not just any weight training. No, it needs to be high weight low reps. No, high reps low weight. Scratch that, high intensity!

No! You fool! You are overtraining! You need recovery time. Oh, you took recovery time because you can’t sit on the potty without a Life Alert bracelet? You’re just going to have to suck it up.

Did we mention your diet?

Remember, simplicity is KEY.

If you do cardio, eat carbs 90 minutes before aerobic exercise and protein 30 minutes before weight training. Then protein within 90 minutes after doing cardio.

Post-workout, rub your body in coconut oil (unrefined, of course) and stretch but only when Mercury is in retrograde–and within the 123 minute window after cardio–or the stretching and expensive coconut oil all a waste.

Got it? No. Okay, let’s create a plan for you. Mastercard or Visa?

The next thing we know this FUN time at the gym has now turned into a personal hell where we are prodded by macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients all using pointy vitamin-supplement pitch forks.

We cling to that trainer who saved us from our pointless 30-minute walks and toss money at her if only she can help it all make sense (or she will go away)!

More often than not, we return to our blanket fort…where there are snacks.

We adults do this crap ALL THE TIME. Hey I am guilty, too. We know as adults we should want to be better, do better and we start out well-meaning enough.

Yet we fall for it…

Sacred Cow #3—The More It SUCKS the BETTER!

From books on “simple home organization” to “better parenting” to “eating healthier” to “financial freedom” we generally tend to fall into this bizarre belief that the more it sucks, the better it must be.

Like the crappier food tastes, the healthier it is!

Right?

Soon, we start shackling ourselves to all kinds of bizarre and UNFUN legalism. We wanted to be free (of extra weight, too much clutter, too many bills).

Yet all these books and courses and virtual tools to save time and make life better…kinda just make us want to drink heavily and OD on brownie batter.

We soon find we avoid the gym we once loved like Ebola, are afraid of our mailbox, and with our spouse and kids? We turn into the HULK only meaner and in yoga pants (because those won’t split when we “turn”).

THIS IS A SPONTANEOUS SCHEDULED FAMILY FUN SESSION AND SO HELP ME YOU BETTER START SMILING OR I…WILL…END…YOU!

Hmm, maybe just me.

Why DO We DO This?

Much can be blamed on Western culture (Americans being the most guilty). Many of us are taught from youth that FUN=BAD.

We’re riddled with guilt about pleasure and fun (and sure, we can probably blame those sour-faced Puritans for laying the groundwork).

*stabs Plymouth Rock in my mind*

Yet kids are robbed of recess, daydreaming is forbidden, and only school-sanctioned imaginative activities are allowed (refer to why my son was kicked out of preschool for liking zombies). Put a kid in sports, gymnastics or dance and see how long it takes for all the fun to get sucked right out of THAT.

Why does all this happen?

Because fun-stealing is big business if we allow it.

Cruise lines can sell us a package of joy and harmony and relaxation. Then, the pharmaceutical companies step in to sell us the anti-anxiety meds required for taking a whole week off to have…*gulp* fun.

We return to our day jobs and 547 unread emails is our penalty for being so selfish as to believe we might actually need to rest now and again.

Maybe we should buy that app to check messages at sea.

Many Americans proudly wear the “I Haven’t Taken a Day Off Since Y-2K” badge of honor…even though we all secretly hate them and know if they took a little time for fun, they might actually not be such frigging jerks.

*breathes deeply*

And Ms. I Never Take Vaca is there to sneer at us for our “weakness.” She embodies FUN! Because the sheer joy of leading the PTA, baking a zillion nut-free GF cookies, and zooming her kids to every social event imaginable is fulfillment in and of itself and all the “fun” required for “good mothers.”

*stabs her in our minds, too*

And Mr. I Never Need Holiday is there at work (where else?). He recommends the Intensive Weeklong Fasting and Time-Management-Leadership-Be-Your Best-Self-in-Less-Than-Nine-Minutes-a-Day-Retreat…which is of course, conveniently offered on-line.

Also, he can reach us every minute of the day via text or email…unlike when we were so naughty as to take that cruise.

It’s madness. I know!

Yet here we are. All staring at each other on the crazy train wondering how the heck we keep meeting again.

Follow the Money

Honest truth is authentic fun is not near the moneymaker as the “shill” of fun. Look at all those “activities” I mentioned that should be fun and who’s there to step in? Experts.

Who happen to make money.

Who can help us with our exercise, diet, meditation, and train our kids for the Olympics!

***Even though little Mackenzie just liked doing cartwheels and we thought gymnastics class would be fun—silly us!

When we were kids who simply had FUN, we didn’t count how many minutes of cardio we’d done riding bikes four hours straight. We gave no thought to the carbs or lack of macro-nutrients in that giant cherry Slurpee we inhaled.

Then we grew up and used our larger and more highly developed brains to think all the fun out of well…pretty much everything.

I see this over and over in social media.

The greatest tool writers have been handed to become free, is being used to enslave us.

“Experts” tell us that an author platform is serious business. If we’re having fun, then we aren’t being professional.

We need automation and vlogs and podcasts and to be everywhere on every site all the time contributing mind-blowing content for exposure!

*feels dirty inside*

Then there is the gathering emails, decoding analytics, sales strategies, promotional tactics, targeting our market…

Call me crazy, but does any of that sound like ANY FUN? SERIOUSLY! We all started this writing journey because we are the dreamers and find imaginary people more interesting than real ones (because they are). We wanted to write to be FREE!

To have FUN!

Granted, a brand is important and social media is vital, and selling lots of books way more fun than selling no books. But anyone who’s shoveling out manure from one of those sacred cows we tipped?

RUN!

Refuse the Kool-Aid

On social media FUN is SUPER effective. People are drawn to it. The world is a dark and dreary place and getting gloomier by the second. Fun stands out.

Authenticity is priceless! We know it when we see it because joy shines bright!

It creates genuine connections (code for relationships). But here is the kicker! Friendship, trust, care, hope, joy and fun cannot be measured in metrics .

And when stuff is fun–as in truly fun–we ENJOY DOING IT. When we enjoy it, we don’t have to outsource it, set reminders or pay people to do it FOR us.

I am not completely eschewing all experts because um…that would be dumb. Experts who empower us are great! Who teach us how to set up properly to avoid injury, waste or pain? Yay!

But experts who make us into permanent revenue streams because they’ve overwhelmed us and made us hysterical?

RUN!

Because many will convince us the more something sucks the better it works…but they (benevolently) have an affordable plan to deliver us from this suckage.

Yep.

Blunt truth is if we don’t tip some of these sacred cows, it just leaves us the cash cow.

In the end, life is short. Enjoy it.

What are your thoughts? Are you like me and struggle with fun? Then try to do something fun and overcomplicate it and wreck it? I know I do. Hey, I am a work in progress too!

Do you feel like “experts” are constantly there to pounce on you and wring cash out of you? Do you fall for the “It only works if I am miserable”?

Hey I write this blog for FREE and constantly look for experts, but to stay on top of scm, trends, business, craft, I have to be SUPER careful. I strive to be better to help y’all be better and that is not always easy *deletes 765 unsolicited emails from experts*

I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU! And I am NOT above BRIBERY!

What do you WIN? For the month of OCTOBER, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

To also prove social media is and should be super fun and that while you might need a little training, you DO NOT need a team of professionals paid to “manage your brand”:

I have two upcoming classes Social Media FREEDOM–Harnessing Passion & Creativity to Cultivate Fans & Harnessing Our Writing POWER–The Blog

I highly recommend you sign up for one of our upcoming classes listed below. ****Note, those who subscribe by email, the visual gallery doesn’t show, so please click through and sign up! We look forward to seeing you and serving you in class! Helping you be the best you can so your work can stand apart .

[abcf-grid-gallery-custom-links id=”22231″]

The post Fun is for LOSERS! If You Aren’t Miserable, You’re Doing it WRONG! appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

I hear all the time that “motivational stuff” is crap, that cheerleading is useless, that all those books and speeches are there simply to take our money. What is success? Well, I don’t believe that success is worth giving up everything. Life and love are more important than being the best. And, to an extent I will agree.

Motivational Stuff is Crap

I don’t know about you guys, but I love The Container Store. Every year I set my New Year’s Resolution and it always…always includes this phrase. “Be more organized.” This morning I was hunting for the cat food. I’d apparently hidden it from myself. In the bottom of my pantry I spotted one of those white-board weekly organizers…still in the WRAP.

*hides head in shame*

Exactly how well is that weekly organizer working for me tucked in the back of a pantry? Yes, The Container Store really does exist simply to take my money. They aren’t going to do a home visit and make sure I actually hung that calendar on my WALL. It is not their responsibility to make sure I applied that product for its intended purpose.

Same with motivational stuff.

Original image courtesy of flowcomm, via Flickr Commons

Thing is, motivation alone is useless. Motivation is like food. If I buy a bunch of organic veggies and leave them in the fridge to die a slow, lonely death, they do zilch nada for my health and energy levels. Yet, my health and energy levels will suffer without them. I have to make the effort to ingest this fuel so my body can put it to use.

If I don’t feed my body it gets sick and weak and could eventually die. So then how effective will I be if I never feed my spirit?

Motivation is fantastic, but it is worthless unless applied. It is potential energy that we must convert into kinetic energy.

The Mind and Will are POWERFUL

If motivation wasn’t powerful, then why do we remember Ghandi, Churchill, Kennedy, and Vince Lombardi?

I love crime shows and after you watch a few thousand episodes of Law & Order or Hannibal or whatever, they kind of all blend together. But, there was one episode of Criminal Minds that affected me deeply. It actually wasn’t the goriest or the most gruesome of the killers. In comparison to some of the crime scenes from Hannibal? It paled.

Why did it disturb me so much?

I have looked for which episode it was and can’t find it, so here goes.

The team is discovering victims who clearly were abducted and held captive, but there is no clear reason why they are dead. They simply are.

What the team uncovers is the killer abducts a victim and holds them. Day after day they are fed, given what they need to survive (physically) and the killer brings in the one thing that keeps them hoping. In one case, it is a young mother. He wheels in a TV with video of her children as they are growing up without her. Day after day she sees the one thing that keeps her pressing.

Then, he stops. He continues to bring food and water, but no more footage of her children.

Without hope, the woman simply one day rolls over and dies.

When the team captures the killer and gets his backstory, he talks about being a boy and running across a young woman who’d fallen into a well on their property. She is treading water and screaming for help. He bent over and reached out a hand to help her and her face lit up. Then? He pulls his hand back and simply watches her. The moment she realizes she has no hope of being saved, her eyes change and she lets go and lets herself float down and die.

It was that look, that moment he craved. The moment in his vicim’s eyes when they gave up. When hope simply evaporated and there was no WHY to carry on. He managed to kill all his victims without ever laying a hand on them.

Though I saw this episode at least eight years ago, I still remember it. And it still freaks me out.

Granted, this is an extreme dramatization, but is it? We have all kinds of stories about people who survived POW camps, concentration camps, disasters, etc. who shouldn’t have. Why did they? They kept hoping. The mind and will were far more powerful and able to go beyond the limits of the physical body.

Success is Personal and It WILL Cost Us

When I talk about success, I am using very broad strokes. Success has to be defined by US. I actually have no interest in being a billionaire. Granted, it would be fantastic if it happened, but I am unwilling to have money at the expense of people and relationships. People are my WHY, not money. Success to me is then measured in those around me, not necessarily my bank account.

But that is ME.

Success of any kind has a price. To be a “successful” mother, I have to sacrifice. It is way easier for me to let The Spawn go feral and forage off chips for breakfast. It takes time to make him a healthy meal. It takes time to watch documentaries with him and teach him to swim and help teach his Jiu Jitsu class. But, I am sacrificing to invest in him. In our relationship and in his future.

A great marriage will cost us. A clean house, a tidy yard, a balanced bank account, a trim waist, etc.

If we want to be “successful” at this writing thing, the bare minimum requirement for “being a successful writer” is words written down…which will cost us time we could be spending watching Criminal Minds  .

No One Else Can Define It 

Original image courtesy of Flickr Creatinve Commons, courtesy of Ali Samieivafa.

First, I will say we have to take the wheel. What my success looks like and what YOURS look like are vastly different things. For years, I allowed others to define my success. I spent years reaching for outside approval that never came.

If you read last post, I told y’all I was a high school drop out twice over. I worked my tail off to win an Air Force Scholarship to become a doctor and I did. Why did I do it? After years of being a disappointment to all those around me, I wanted my grandparents to finally say they were proud of me.

When I came home to tell my grandparents the news I’d won, my grandmother’s first words were, “Well, they must have been short on their quota for women.”

*Kristen dies more than a little inside*

Later, I graduated from TCU with a degree in International Relations. Actually, it was Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa. You know, one of those easy fluff degrees .

I did this hoping they’d be proud. Ehhh, no.

Then, I landed a premium job in sales hoping they’d be proud. Nope.

Then I got into law school. Nope.

Finally? I gave up trying to make others give me that atta’ girl and did what I loved. I became a writer. All those years I was reaching for dreams that weren’t mine, I was sick and miserable because I had the wrong WHY. When I finally went after MY dream, eventually I no longer cared if they were proud of me or not.

Definitions are Personal and Ever-Changing

When we read motivational stories or watch videos or movies, it is easy to feel like a loser. But, we all start where we are. When I was a baby writer, I remember thinking, Wow, if I could write 500 words a day, then I will have made it. Now, I write a thousand words before breakfast, but that took YEARS and YEARS.

But if I’d started with a goal of 2-3,000 words a day? If I’d beaten myself up because I only wrote 500? I would have given up a long time ago.

When was smacked with Shingles last year, my definition of a “successful day” had to change if I was ever going to get better. And I would love to say that I didn’t cry and whine and complain and throw tantrums. I did. Shingles involved month after month of pain piled on pain piled on even more pain.

Actually this is a pic after it was a LOT better….

I hated everyone. I hated myself, my family and probably hated kittens and puppies, too. If Zig Ziglar had visited me? I might have just punched him in the face. It was hard to admit that “success” during that time, might have just involved getting out of bed and wearing a bra (the Shingles were all down my ribs).

But eventually we must adjust what is a “win” or our mind will devour us.

Of course, now that I am in remission from Shingles, I need to adjust. Wearing a bra is a noble goal, but I kinda should be past that .

No One Else Can DO It

Original image via Flikr Creative Commons, courtesy of Crossfit.

We have to do the work. We have to define what we want and why we want it. Then we have to do the work. There is a lot of talk about giving others the right opportunity. I used to believe in that, but now? Not so much.

I was president of a writing group for years. They complained the reason they didn’t attend was the meeting place, so I got us a nice meeting space. None of them showed. Then, these folks griped that they couldn’t attend because we met at an inconvenient time, so I managed to find a second meeting space on Saturday mornings for those who couldn’t make a weekday evening.

Again, none of them showed. The handful of complainers who did sporadically attend never wrote anything.

Members complained when I recommended craft books. Was I suggesting they didn’t know how to WRITE? Most refused to go to conferences or take classes. They groused about the speakers. They didn’t have time to write the novel, but they had plenty of time to craft long e-mails complaining about some new thing I wasn’t doing for them.

Week after week, year after year, I showed and tried to add more “opportunities” to no avail. Finally, I learned a tough lesson I hadn’t wanted to believe. Talk is cheap. Though being part of that group was painful, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I thought I’d overcome my addiction to approval when I told my family to “Pound sand” and became a writer.

Ah, but did I?

Nope, I’d simply shifted my addiction from my family to a local writing group. I was still just as addicted to people pleasing and I needed others to “approve” of me and my dreams.

I had to learn that I could not expect average people to be extraordinary. Also, I could no longer hide behind their lack of approval as an excuse of not moving forward. I had to leave them behind and risk failing alone. I could not hand them enough opportunities and definitely could not motivate them into success.

Motivation is the fuel for the soul, but we have to light the spark and WE have to take charge of using and directing that for forward momentum. Like approval, motivation is wonderful, but not entirely necessary. Sometimes, we simply have to dig deep and keep going even when there is no outward sign we are doing anything right.

Writing is NOT an Easy Job

We don’t clock in and clock out. We don’t have a boss looking over our shoulders who will send us to Writer Jail if we don’t make word count. No one will discipline us if we don’t take any Continuing Education. Most of what we DO, others don’t see (or even value). This is a very unique profession that probably requires us take care of our Spirit Self more than other jobs.

Take time for yourself. Feed your spirit, but then put that fuel to work. Just like craft books do us NO good collecting dust on a shelf, motivation is similarly useless if not put into action. Opportunities are meaningless if we ignore them.

What are your thoughts? Do you find yourself falling into approval addiction or people pleasing? Do you have to revisit your goals because you’ve let others do too much influencing when it comes to what “success” looks like? Do you rely too much on motivation? Heck, I am guilty. Do you forget that your mind and will need nourishing too?

I love hearing from you!

Quick Announcement: 

Due to popular demand, THIS SATURDAY I am rerunning my Hooking the Reader—Your First Five Pages at the end of the month and I am doing something different. Gold Level includes me looking (and shredding your first five) but I have added in some higher levels and will look at up to 20 pages. This can be really useful if you’re stuck. I can help you diagnose the problems. It’s also a great deal if you have to submit to an agent and want to make your work the best it can be.

Again, I LOVE hearing from you!

To prove it and show my love, for the month of JULY, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less). 

For those who need help building a platform and keeping it SIMPLE, pick up a copy of my latest social media/branding book Rise of the Machines—Human Authors in a Digital World on AMAZON, iBooks, or Nook. 

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