As I look back on 2015 and look down the sparkling maw that is 2016, I’m filled with much excitement for this year. Let’s look back on 2015 to see some of what I’ve accomplished:
Landing a contract for When Stars Die with Gnome on Pig Productions.
Passing my exam to be certified as a personal trainer.
Earning my specialty certification in functional fitness.
Starting the advanced level in ballet.
Finally nailing those blasted foutte turns.
Writing, completing, and publishing A Treacherous Flame. (Seriously, this is huge for me because I hadn’t written anything in a while.)
Recovering from my eating disorder in April.
Being free from depression for an entire year. (I’ll write a post later this week on what this feels like for me.)
Now here is what I hope to accomplish in 2016:
Earning my group fitness certification.
Finding a job as both a personal trainer and group fitness instructor.
Getting The Stars Are Infinite published.
Increasing sales for When Stars Die.
Graduating with my BA.
Moving in with my fiance and getting married.
Studying for a specialty certification in nutrition.
Having a full list of clients within three months, preferably before I earn my BA.
Getting back en pointe since my shoes are dead and I screwed up my foot when I fell on it in pointe class.
Building more muscle through ballet and crosstraining.
Helping clients succeed with their fitness goals.
Writing a novella (or novel, whatever it turns out to be) for Forevermore Publishing.
Writing the third book in The Stars Trilogy.
These are all of my goals for the year of 2016. It’s a lengthy list, but I know I can succeed.
Every day I am, for a brief moment (thank goodness), plagued by anxieties about my career as an author. As a poet, it’s just beginning, but as a novelist, it’s stalled due to the closing of AEC Stellar Publishing, Inc., forcing When Stars Die to become an orphaned book. Along with these anxieties, jealousy briefly pricks a minute hole in my heart.
I am not bitter that AEC Stellar Publishing, Inc. had to close its doors. What I hate is that my novel has yet to find a home, despite every publisher I’ve sent it to requesting a full, then rejecting it. It’s like holding out a bag of Swedish Fish to me, then yanking it away. I received an acceptance–finally!–but the contract fell through, which was very unfortunate. Yes, my novel is with a publisher who allowed me to skip the entire process, which looks promising, but it’s still part of the waiting game I wish I no longer had to play. It’s been four months since I requested my rights back and my book removed from all retail sites. Other AEC authors decided to self-publish their books, and one received a contract from a publisher about two months ago. This is where jealousy pricks my heart and makes me wonder when or if my book will ever find a new home. I hope the publisher it’s with will take it. I sense promise, but I also cannot presume anything, just because the publisher took charge of the book instead of the acquisitions editor, who is actually the one who rejects or accepts a book.
It’s especially difficult when you detail the journey of your book, and when you talk about your rejections, those who have read and loved your book reassure you that your book will find a home–and then you wonder. It isn’t enough to have a decent amount of ratings on Goodreads with an overall good rating; the publisher still has to love your book to want to work with it. So this is just a lesson that you’re always in the same boat as unpublished authors. Always. Unless you’re Stephen King or some other massively popular author.
Unfortunately, rejection is part of the game. To me, it’s simply harder when you have two houses who wanted your book, one it was published with and another that didn’t work out. I would feel differently if When Stars Die had never been published, but I don’t, so I feel like the waiting game is much more agonizing than it is for unpublished authors. It’s especially agonizing, as my options for publishers are limited since not every one will take on a previously published book. I am exceptionally grateful for those that do. All beautiful, well-loved books deserve a second chance. I also keep in mind that publishers who accept books are probably just as anxious for writers to accept their contracts as the authors are for waiting to hear back from a publisher.
Luckily, I am keeping busy by writing, so it’s not as if I’m sitting around doing absolutely nothing. I’ve finished the revisions for 39 poems I’m including in my collection. I have chapter one outlined for the novella that will begin this collection. I have two places in mind to submit it to. I have two poems being published and appearing May 2nd. I’m also slowly copy editing a finished novel with two publishers–thus far–in mind to submit it to, though one publisher doesn’t want simultaneous submissions, so that will be my first publisher of choice. Reading helps, too, and I have been reading plenty of novels and poetry.
All I can do is keep carrying on. No matter what happens, When Stars Die will see itself back in print. I will not let The Stars Trilogy die.
I feel like Saturdays and Sundays will be a mixed bag of things, from guest posts, to interviews, to stuff about me as a writer.
I never saw myself writing poetry. Ever. Back when I was at Georgia Regents University (a name I detest since the school was re-named out of vanity), I took a creative writing class with a professor whom will remain unknown out of respect. I took this class because I wanted to learn how to write poetry. I wanted to understand poetry beyond the canon of classical works literature students must read that I couldn’t enjoy, as I had to do a myriad of read-throughs to understand these poems. Thus, at the time, I thought poetry had to be complicated. So when we received assignments for poems to write, that is what I did–I made them complicated, and the results were horrendous.
I attribute 100% of the blame to the professor, who had no idea how to even teach poetry. We didn’t study the types of poetry one could choose from, from sonnet to free-form to haiku. We had no creative writing textbook. We weren’t given any pointers what-so-ever about writing our own poems. Workshops were unhelpful, as the students were just as clueless, and we were never given any guidance on how we could critique a piece of writing. When we received feedback from the professor, it was vague and awful. Next to a particular line, he would write “a stone,” meaning we could turn that line of poetry over and find more beneath it. That was the most unhelpful garbage ever, so I never learned how to truly write poetry.
Then I switched colleges due to my erratic mental health, which is still erratic to this day. I attend Columbia College of Missouri and take their online courses. I decided to take creative writing again, and I learned so much more. We were actually given a textbook on how to write creatively. My previous class had no such textbook. We also had textbooks to read poems and short stories from. We had discussions about what we thought worked and didn’t work, as it related to our creative writing textbook. Workshops still weren’t helpful, but the students were complete beginners, and I am not, so they stuck, hardcore, to the rules of writing I abandoned a few years ago. At least the professor gave us guidelines.
This creative writing class was MUCH better. I learned poetry doesn’t need to be complicated. The best poems are ones easily understood in a first read-through. I also learned this from Mariah Wilson as well. She was–and is–my mentor throughout this class. The professor’s feedback was so simple for the poems, but they made a world of difference. It was ACTUAL feedback. He would say, “This poem has a lot of potential. I think this poem would work much better with more enjambment” or whatever he felt was best for that particular piece. And you knew what he meant and could apply it. So simple, yet so effective. I only listened to his feedback and disregarded students’ feedback because it was obvious they were trying TOO hard to criticize a piece of work. I’m grateful I re-took creative writing (earning an A :D), because this is when I fell in love with poetry.
Even so, I still didn’t see myself publishing it. Then I experienced a recent curve ball, which has triggered my PTSD horribly. I won’t go into this. Poetry suddenly became an appealing escape for me, so I wrote. I then decided I had so many ideas for poems that I might as well write a collection and seek publication for it.
I ravenously began to devour poetry, especially from my American Literature II class, where poetry is a huge chunk of what we read. I’ve also finished reading Mariah’s We Walk Alone, which I beg you buy. It is incredible. Rachel Thompson is also an amazing novelist/essayist/poet. I recommend both of her books you can find on her Amazon Author page. I implore you to check out her work as well, as it inspired my collection that will include a novella and 36 poems. I do have a publisher in mind in which to submit this work to, one who reached out to all AEC authors.
I now write poetry because poems can be me. I am poems. I love being a novelist first and foremost, but it’s in bad taste for an author to insert herself into the novel she’s writing, unless it’s a nonfiction piece. With poetry, however, you can lay all of yourself down into a piece of poetry, which is exactly what I did in every poem I wrote. The novella, however, is a bit more complicated. After all, it’s about a young girl named Alexandria living in an exaggerated 19th-century mental hospital. Perhaps it isn’t exaggerated, but mental hospitals began to improve around her time. The first two parts have been published, and you can go to my bio to read those. But they are going to be revised. I have not gone through what Alexandria will go through, but it still fits with the overall theme of my collection.
Poetry is my catharsis, my purging of feelings.
I am so proud to now call myself a poet along with being a novelist. Maybe even an essayist in the future.
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