Life

Irritated and Inadequate in North Carolina

| rachelhamm

Dear fellow Bloggers,

I’m slightly irritated.  I know, big shocker.  I tend to get irritated at the drop of a hat, but at least I recognize that about myself, right? Possibly why I’m still single?  But I digress…

Okay, so why am I irritated?  I just finished reading a book.  I both enjoyed the book and hated it.  Isn’t that the worst?  I enjoyed it because I was rooting for two of the characters and really wanted a love story for them.  I hated it because it did all the things we aspiring writers are told not to do and did not do them in a way that made me say, “Well, if you’re going to break the rules, do it like that.”  It broke all those rules and did it in way that I was annoyed throughout most of the book thinking, I SO would have loved to critique this book before it went to the agent, maybe then there’d be fewer instances of POV head-hopping, information backstory dumps, more explanation of what certain things that may not be familiar to the entire world are, and a helluv a lot more character depth, growth, and development.

This particular book was the third one published by this author.  I wonder if the glaring rule-breaking was present in her first book.  I wonder if she was able to get the first book past agent gatekeepers with these same really annoying elements.  Actually makes me want to read the first book.  Isn’t that weird?  But my point is, that I think it’s so much easier once you have an agent and you’ve had other books published to produce a mediocre book.  Why weren’t the obvious instances of POV head-hopping addressed before this book was published?  My guess is because it didn’t go through as much editing before it went to the agent and publisher.  Because the author already had the agent and publisher.

And of course, thinking this way about a book that I’m holding in my hands and reading makes me think about my own book.  Makes me wonder if I’ll ever have the courage to attempt another round of queries, if I’ll ever be able to hold it in my hands, bound, with a cover bearing my name as the author.  I think that it should be out there in the world, that it would make people happy to read it.  But I can’t pluck up the courage to sit down, write a query, and send it out.  I believe the book is good.  I know that the only thing holding me back is me, I’m just not really sure why I’m holding myself back.  Isn’t that what cripples most people in pursuing their dreams?  Themselves?  What am I afraid of?  Being told I’m not good enough, I think.

In all honestly, I think that fear has plagued me my whole life.  The fear of being inadequate.  And yet, I make myself inadequate by not just going for it, by not believing that I AM good enough.

I told that story the other day about the waiter who hit on me and I tried to make it funny, because when I step back and think about it, it really was funny.  But the truth is, I didn’t find it that funny when I wrote about it.  When he told me I was beautiful, my first instinct was to laugh and immediately dismiss it as a joke.  I certainly didn’t feel beautiful and couldn’t really understand why he would say that.  The more I thought about it the less funny it became.  When I left the restaurant and got into my car, I imagined telling people what had happened and my next thought was that no one would believe me.  Or that people would believe that it had happened, but not that the guy actually meant what he said.  I did tell a few people, I guess in the hopes that they wouldn’t have that reaction, and no one did.  And you know what my next thought was?  That they did have that reaction internally but were keeping it to themselves.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THAT PICTURE?

I’m never going to have confidence in myself if my brain automatically goes to that place where I can’t believe it when someone says something nice about me.  I’ll always be “not good enough” if I don’t allow myself to be good enough.  I don’t know why I’m sharing this with the world, if indeed the few people who read this blog can be considered the world.  I guess because I write now.  Even if sometimes it does make me feel inadequate.  And maybe writing this will force me to be good enough for myself so that I can take my book, that I spent a year pouring my heart into, and actually try and get it into the hands of someone who can make it good enough for the world.

Sincerely,

Irritated and Inadequate in North Carolina

Self-Esteem Boost of the Day

| rachelhamm

The good stuff’s at the bottom, so keep reading…

I had a really random weekend.  I had to work at the orthodontist’s on Friday, which I don’t usually do because we are typically off on Fridays.  On my lunch break I had to call all of the vendors for the wedding I’m working on the 24th.

Then on Saturday I drove to Durham to my boss’s house so we could ride to Asheville together for a seminar today.  Stupid us didn’t realize until I was already at her house that my house in Burlington is on the way to Asheville, so I drove an extra 45 minutes for no reason!

So today we went to the seminar and it was really a great class.  We learned about personality types and how we should approach selling ourselves to the different types of personalities thanks to Samantha Goldberg.  Then Mark Kingsdorf taught us about marketing our business and branding ourselves and I won a free hour consultation with him for our business!  SWEET!

Plus, Sam and I have decided to start a blog for Bliss by Sam.  We’re going to launch it next month and it’s going to be called Daring, Devoted, which is our company slogan.  Sam, our assistant Ali, and I are each going to be writing articles and we’ll be posting once a week.  My articles are going to be called: “So You Think You’re That Devoted…” and are going to be all about the aspects of wedding planning that really shouldn’t be DIY and every once and a while will include something that can easily be DIY.  Other recurring articles will be called “How Dare You,” “I Dare You To,” and “I Second that Devotion.”  I’m excited to get started on it and will of course link to it when it’s ready.

Now, on to the reason for the title of today’s post.  We left Ashville at 4:00 today and I drove all the way back to Durham, picked up my car and headed back to Burlington.  I stopped in Mebane to get some dinner at my favorite restaurant because I was tired and didn’t want to be driving anymore and I just wanted a little “alone” time since I’d been hanging out with my boss for the past 28 hours straight.  I got a booth for one, ordered my meal, and pulled out my book.  After the server brought my food and refilled my drink he stopped and said, “You know, I just have to say, you’re really beautiful.”

Whoa.  Ok, so I had just put two french fries in my mouth and I couldn’t really respond, but I could feel my cheeks just burning and he kept talking.  “You’re sitting there, reading your book with your cute little reading glasses…”

All I managed to mumble was “thank you,” and then he walked away.  Then when he came back a little later he asked me how old I am, and I told him 25.  He said something like, “Well you still have it going on,” or something like that.  I said, “Still?  25’s not old!”

He said, “No, but I’m 21.  Well, almost 21.”

Then when he brought me my check, he said, “We’re not supposed to do this, but if you want to leave me your number I’ll give you a call sometime.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that point, it was just so ridiculous.  No guy has ever asked for my number, and here’s this kid server who’s probably just trying to get a bigger tip out of me asking for it!  I told him that he needed to work on turning 21 first and then maybe we’d talk.

He didn’t let up!  He said, “I’ll be 21 in June!”

And my birthday’s in June, too, so I told him that and he asked me when it was, and I told him and he said his was on the same day.  I think he really was lying about that, but it was just so funny.  I laughed all the way home.  I’m going to think about this little encounter the rest of the week anytime that I’m feeling a little down on myself.  It was just so random and ridiculous!  But, it makes me feel good about myself all the same!

Now your turn- share your most random “I got hit on” stories in the comments!

Better to have loved and lost?

| rachelhamm

You know the quote.  Everyone does.  “It is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.”

I’m thinking about this quote tonight because I actually saw a comment that a couple of reviewers made on a poem on TNBW (not a poem I wrote BTW).  One of the reviewers used this quote and the other reviewer wondered if reviewer #1 had ever felt so broken that death felt like a better option.

I think that’s incredibly unfair of reviewer #2, personally.  If you HAVE loved, even if you have lost someone, then you’ve known the greatest joy there is in this world.  You’ve had a light at the end of the tunnel.  You’ve had starlight and fairy dust.

If you HAVEN’T loved, well, then I totally feel your pain.  You can’t describe that pain to another person who has loved.  They don’t understand it.  The emptiness.  The torment as you ponder day in and day out what the hell is wrong with you and why the hell no one in this world has ever cared about you.  You walk around every day bleeding inside.  Loneliness defines you.  Something funny happens and you have no one to run and share it with.  Not only do you have no one right now, you’ve never had anyone.  You feel like you never will have anyone.  Yet you smile.  You enjoy life.  You find pleasure in the little things.  Because you know what will happen if you don’t.  You really will be alone forever because no one wants to be with someone as unhappy as you truly are.

So.  Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?  I don’t know.  I can’t answer the question because I’ve only been on one side of it, but if I had to bet, I’d say yes.  I’d shout it from the rooftops.  I’d take a broken heart over an un-used one any day.  And I know there will be people who want to argue with me, but I’m sorry.  I don’t feel an ounce of sympathy for you right now if you’ve broken up with your boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife and it was the absolute worst experience of your life because I’m too busy being jealous of you.

Okay, that’s not completely true.  I will feel sympathy for you and that will just make me hate you even more.

Oh.  And though this post has nothing to do with a practical joke, Happy April Fool’s Day!

What I Learned This Week

| rachelhamm

I’m often told that my writing is very honest- that I’m not afraid of putting myself out there on the page.  And I definitely find this is true.  In fact, I’m more honest in my writing than in actual conversation.  Not because I am untruthful in real conversation, but because I often just can’t find the right way to express myself.  Somehow, in writing, I always can.

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon a lot lately.  Namely due to this guy I went out on a couple of dates with.  Let me emphasize A COUPLE OF DATES.  I’ll be more precise.  TWO dates.  You’ll see why the number is important in a minute.

This guy is very nice and we had a good time hanging out together.  He’s also very religious.  Not religious in the sense that he thinks you’ll go to hell for smoking, drinking, and cursing, because he certainly does those things, but religious in the sense that he feels a very deep faith in God and Jesus.

I respect his faith.  I respect anyone who is able to have an unwavering belief that God is the answer to anything.  But.  I am not one of those people/  I believe in God, but I don’t always like him.  This turned out to be a problem for said guy.

Personally, I think discussing religion on the first couple of dates is a BIG MISTAKE.  But, God isn’t as important to me as it is to him, so the subject came up.  I tried to explain I wasn’t comfortable talking about it, but it was important to him.  I finally wrote down my entire history with church and God because I felt like I wasn’t expressing myself very well verbally.

I am really proud of what I wrote.  I found it incredibly beautiful and honest.  One day maybe I’ll share it with you, but it is still very personal.

The whole experience also made me think about myself in a new way.  I’ve decided I’m pretty awesome.  I’m not saying that from a conceited place, but from a it’s-time-I-had-a-little-more-confidence place.  Because really, I’m an awesome person.  If things had worked out with the guy, he would have been lucky to have me.  Because I’m funny, and witty, and I don’t always take everything so seriously.  I can have fun sitting in the Garden Center at Wal-Mart playing dots.  (One of the activities on our first date.)  I’m smart, and dammit, I’m going to do something incredible in life.  I don’t know what that thing is yet, but I believe it’s going to happen.  I have passion.  I care about people.  I’m thoughtful.  I’m pretty when I get dressed up.  I’m freaking awesome, and just because no guy has been able to handle all of my awesomeness up til now, doesn’t mean that no guy ever will.  Because some guy is going to see it.  And he is going to be incredibly awesome, too.

One other thing I learned this week (which has absolutely nothing to do with the other two things), thanks to Nathan Bransford’s blog: I use too much repetition in my writing.  It is always good when you see a post by an agent that helps you recognize and remedy a problem!  Thank you, Nathan!

So, to recap, what I’ve learned this week:

1) I’m able to express myself more completely through written words.

2) I’m pretty f***ing awesome.

3) I need to edit for repetition.

A pretty good week, I think!

Creative Void

| rachelhamm

I’m feeling a bit of a creative void.  It’s not writer’s block, it’s more of a listlessness.  A non-desire to write, create, produce.

I got a really bad review of a chapter of Twenty-Five a couple of weeks ago.  The reader said the characters were cookie cutter, the sentence structure monotonous, and the dialogue cliche.  They said “there’s no story here.”

Of course, reading a review like that is like diving head first into freezing cold water.  It’s a shock to the system.  You wonder- did this person read my work and actually think that?  or were they just being mean and spiteful?  I have to believe that it’s a little bit of a mixture of the two extremes.

I know, deep in my heart, that my characters are not cookie cutter.  They have histories, dreams, plans for the future.  I know what they look like, how they act, their likes and dislikes.  I’ve thought them through completely and I didn’t just base them on the archetypal characters you see in book after book, story after story.  However, I can understand how, in an isolated chapter, without the buildup of the beginning of the story and their relationship, a reader would miss their complexity and depth.

With the monotonous sentence structure comment, I think the reader may have a point.  I’ve been reading through my book slowly the last couple of nights and I think I do have issues with varying sentence structure.  There just aren’t that many ways to structure a series of actions without getting into lavish descriptions and similes and metaphors, which I hate.  So, one of my goals is to find fresher ways of saying what I want to say.

As far as the dialogue being cliche, I have to say- WHOA.  I am really surprised anyone would say that about my dialogue because if there’s one thing  that 99.99% of my readers have agreed on, it’s my realistic dialogue.  I can only assume that this is another instance of the isolated chapter, but will defend myself a little in saying that real people in real life use cliches when they talk.  Cliches are around for a reason- they are recognizable, memorable.  Just about everything we say in everyday life can be considered cliche.  For example, if I write this exchange:

“Hey.”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Fine, you?”

“Fine.”

is the cliche police going to strike it down and tell me I can’t use it?

The last comment is the one that really hurt.  “There’s no story here.”  I’ve put my blood, sweat, and tears into this book for the past year (and yes, I realize blood, sweat, and tears is cliche, too) and for someone to tell me there’s no story there, I mean, I can’t even express how much that hurts.  I know its not the first bad review that I’ve gotten, and I know it won’t be the last, but DAMN!  I would never tell someone that there was no “story” in their story.  Because anyone who writes has a story they are trying to tell.  And yes, some stories need more work than others, but everything is a story.  Life is a story.

So all of that to say that it’s been really hard for me to write lately.  I don’t want to be a failure and yet that’s how a review like that makes me feel.  Everyone says, “you’ve got to have a thick skin to make it in this industry.”  But isn’t that true of any industry, of any career?  Is that why I’m still stuck in limbo, I don’t have a thick enough skin?  Am I going to be a failure for the rest of my life?  Am I going to be stuck in the void for the rest of my life?

RANDOM

| rachelhamm

I found this quote online the other day and I have fallen in love with it: “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”  ~Agatha Christie.

It’s just so damn true.  I’m in the middle of probably the hardest time in my life right now.  I’m financially drowning and my social calendar has never been bleaker, but I still know that life is this precious gift I’ve been given.  Yeah, life sucks once and a while and lately it’s sucked all the time, but even days of 99% shittyness (sorry, spell check refuses to tell me how to properly spell this word) there’s always at least 1% greatness.

Take today for example.  I just logged on to my dashboard to check things out and even though I haven’t posted anything new in a while, there hasn’t been a single day in the past 2 weeks where this blog hasn’t gotten at least 6 views.  That’s pretty cool.  I know it doesn’t seem like a lot, but when I first started I’d have several days in a row with 0 views, so I feel like I’m moving up in the world.  Especially since I don’t really know how to advertise myself very well yet.  And, I checked the search terms people used to find my page and this was one of them: a give stick a pen up her virgin.  I’m TOTALLY serious about that.  Someone typed “a give stick a pen up her virgin” into google or yahoo or some other search engine and then clicked on a link to my blog.  Isn’t that just the most hilarious search term you’ve ever heard?

Makes me kind of glad that even in cyberspace I’m the first virgin people think of!

Oh, and to continue my ramblings of randomness, I’ve started work on a new project called The Death Effect.  I’ll create a page for it along with my other projects in a day or so.

And I got the nicest rejection email today.  Here’s a little snippet: “I’ve read your sample pages, and while I think you show great potential as a writer, I’m sorry to say that the project just isn’t a perfect fit with my current needs. This has less to do with your strengths as a writer and more to do with my goals as an agent and the trends of the current literary marketplace.”

Well, thank you, Ms. Super Agent.  I would have really enjoyed working with you, but how can I be upset when you tell me I have potential?  I might just print out that one sentence and stick on the wall behind my desk so I can stare at it when I’m writing.  That’s not weird, right?

OH!  And, Twenty-Five has made it to the #9 spot on the All-Time Rankings at The Next Big Writer.  I’m pretty happy about that.  I’m waiting for the administration to realize it so that my novel is given a spot on the All-Time Top Ten list.  When he does realize it, I’ll get access to a cool logo that I can use when marketing/advertising/selling my book, and you can bet I’ll be re-writing my query to include it’s shiny new status!

So, that’s what’s been going on in my life.  Oh, and I’m looking for a new job, but I may have mentioned that before.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.  I have to have one by January 1st.  Anyone out there in cyberland looking for a freelance editor?  I’m pretty kick-ass at finding grammatical errors and I can use a comma with the best of them!  I don’t have any “education” or “experience” but I can give you several references of writers on TNBW who love my editing skills!

Man, this post has really lived up to its title!