Why Breaks Work For Me
This is the first in a series of guest posts while I spend time with our newest member of the family. Please welcome Rachel McCarthy James!
This is the first piece of writing I’ve published in over three months. During those three months, I’ve let languish the very thing I’ve wanted my entire adult life – an audience who likes my writing and want more of it. I’ve probably lost a few existing readers, and I’ve definitely missed out on many opportunities to build my audience.
But this isn’t a mistake or laziness or procrastination – it’s purposeful. And it’s part of my plan to eventually make a living as a writer.
At writer’s conferences and in critique groups people throw phrases like “social networks” and “platform building” around like cheap confetti. Judging from the glazed look on the eyes of many writers, there seems to be a disconnect between knowing one should work on their online presence, and how to do just that. It’s not enough to tell folks to build a network, because that’s too abstract a concept in a universe of hundreds of social networking Web sites and applications. Worse, all of the jargon is so intimidating many writers begin to justify their absence from the market. “Well, I need to have time to write, not promote myself,” one romance writer told me at this year’s PNWA. Others that I’ve spoken with don’t see the benefit to all of these online sites—it looks to them like a lot of time spent tooling around the interwebs for next to no return on their investment. And that’s a shame.
Emerging writers are tired people. We’re working on building our networks, improving our storytelling and writing, marketing ourselves as writers, and fretting over query letters to entice agents to represent us. The idea that novelists sit around eating bon bons and dictating prose into a recorder is a non-author’s fantasy. Real writers wear out their keyboards and keep going.
Earlier this month at the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association conference in metro Seattle, I went to a workshop on first page critique. The plan as proposed by the panelists, was to have writers bring just their first page of text from their works-in-progress, pass them to the moderator, and listen as the two agents and one editor gave feedback. It sounded to some of us writers like a free craft workshop, which to some degree, it was. But the real gem of helpfulness from this exercise was, in my opinion, the glimpse into how brutal a process of reading unsolicited work can be, and how quickly a publishing professional makes a decision (mostly to reject) a candidate piece of prose.
I’d been sleeping, somewhere between my cycle in fetal position and an overhead reach to stretch out my right hip because years of nursing my left knee had taken its toll on my other side. I suppose it was easy to surround me in my vulnerable state, sitting ducks and all, but I woke up to the sound of them humming. They hummed like camels and llamas do to warn off potential threats, but I guess, with their aggression toward me and all, that their motivation was somewhat different.
Cherry Weiner will suck your bad book idea through a straw into a blender and come up with something entirely different, but it will be sellable, damn it. Don’t interrupt Cherry’s smoking time with your shitty book concept.
They take starting pitchers off the mound and send them to nurse their elbows in something like the sixth inning of Major League Baseball games. There is no such relief for the intrepid, emerging writer. It’s pitch until you drop at events like the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association conference. And here I am, ostensibly dropped, face down on my hotel bed, typing without looking at my hands and thanking Miss Radice of McCorristin Catholic High School that she taught me to memorize a keyboard so well in 1986. 
At last year’s Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association conference, I was shocked to discover that the coordinators hadn’t opted for wifi during any of the workshops or presentations, or in the lounge off the exhibit floor. Maybe they thought it was a nuisance, that the collective clicking of keys would be too much of a distraction from say, Robert Dugoni talking about suspense. I don’t know, give Robert Dugoni some credit; he’s pretty entertaining. And there I was with my month-old iPad, so excited to twitter away a live feed. I was disappointed. This was one situation that made me question whether I should have forgone the 4G connectivity, but it was too late to question, now wasn’t it? 
Maybe it seems like just a couple of weeks ago we all celebrated Memorial Day, and then there was the end of Glenn Beck’s gig on Fox, and suddenly the entire United States was embroiled in an epic saga of betrayal and urgency, all the media trained on one subject that terrified even the most stoic among us—the Casey Anthony trial. No wait, the debt ceiling.
I’m in over my head on revisions to my young adult, time-traveling novel, and truth be told, that’s exactly where I want to be. Of course, I always want to be done already, because there are at least two more projects that I’d love to get started on and they’re beginning to act impatient, stuck as they are at the back of my mind and in the pages of my notebook. But I’m revising right now, and if I’m going to be revising, then I need to be immersed—all of the plot details, characters’ foibles, themes, and accidental lessons up close and personal for me so that I don’t lose sight of them. And I’m sure they appreciate such deft attention.
Trans/plant/portation 