by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
A few weeks ago I took a Sabbath rest from my writing. I do this every seven weeks to give my brain and fingers and stories a rest, so I can come back fresh and ready, and I can protect against burnout.
Normally I use those “working” hours to learn something new or just read and relax or work on other arts and crafts that I don’t normally have time to do. But this Sabbath was the last one before my boys went back to school. So I decided to do something different. I decided to take an entire hour each day and just spend it with each of my boys, individually.
In a household as large as mine, I don’t often have the opportunity to hang out with my boys alone. So I wasn’t even sure what we would do, but I scheduled the time and let them know it was coming. I didn’t have to worry about making plans, because they already had their own plans.
The oldest was first. He wanted to do a puzzle for the first half hour, and then he wanted to write a picture book story together, where he would supply the picture and I would write a story for each page. It was a fun collaboration project that we both really enjoyed and are finishing up soon.
The second-oldest just wanted to do puzzles the whole time, so we talked about his upcoming year of school and how he’ll be in the first grade and whether he thinks he’ll have any of his friends in his class. The third-oldest wanted to do puzzles and read together, which was just fine by me, again. The 3-year-old twins didn’t make it a whole hour (more like 15 minutes), but they just wanted to talk—or ask questions about everything in the world until my eyes glazed over and I started answering, “I don’t know. I don’t know, baby.”
What I found during that time is that my boys became much more connected to me and much more compliant when they burst into the room later and I had to tell them that I was working hard to learn a new program or I was right in the middle of reading a book that I wanted to finish before the week was up, so they needed to shut the door on their way back out. They understood me better. I understood them better. We reestablished our connection.
What I found, coming back from that time of connection, is that my art was richer for the time we had spent together.
There is something about getting out of your normal routine, changing things up a bit, that can make you much more creative when you come back to the drawing board.
So many people nurse the fear that if they give up a whole week of writing, they will lose momentum on whatever project they’ve got going. I felt this way, too, in the beginning. Because I post a blog every Monday, and I was steadily growing an audience around that blog, wouldn’t I lose some of that audience if I had a Monday where a blog didn’t post?
But statistics (which I don’t always like to look at anyway) didn’t tell that story. In fact, my statistics continued to grow steadily.
And I felt much more energized as a writer for my week away from the keyboard.
When we are writers who work from home and don’t go into offices and only do this pursuit, it’s easy to slip into a more-than-full-time work pace, where we fill all the margins with work, because every moment is precious and needed. But working day in and day out, five days a week or seven days a week for the rest of our lives, with no rests in between, can lead us more surely into burnout than success.
If we’re parents, that means that our days are already filled with all the activity that children bring, and we don’t normally get a day off from that. We’re always on. Always on in our family, always on in our work, always on in our lives.
So rest time is doubly important for those who are doing it with children in tow.
Resting from our week makes us more able to do great work. Connecting with our children means we can more effectively connect with our art. We open greater depths in our hearts, which spills out into our work, when we are living life with our whole heart.
If it feels hard to find time for a Sabbath in your normal work load, here are some suggestions:
1. Begin by doubling up one week.
I did this at the beginning of my Sabbath practice. If I had anything that was regularly scheduled, I would double up on it the week before the Sabbath. In other words, the week before my Sabbath rest, I would write two blogs and four story installments and 12,000 words on that book instead of just 6,000. This won’t work indefinitely (and isn’t really the point), but for those just starting out, it can provide a sort of security blanket, because they’ve still produced the same amount of regular content. Just don’t try this for long.
2. Be okay with leaving something unfinished.
I’ve taken several Sabbath weeks this year. Before only one of them (the most recent one) was I able to finish a book’s rough draft in a nice and tidy spot. All the other times I left a book hanging right in the middle of it. This is a scary thing to do, because what if we don’t get back and finish it? What if there’s a noticeable snag in the draft that makes people wonder what exactly happened there?
These are all valid concerns. But they’re really unnecessary. Because, most of the time, what I’ve found is that when I come back from my Sabbath week, I’m that much more able to tackle that plot line again, sometimes with better ideas. That’s because leaving a story for a Sabbath rest doesn’t mean that story is out of our subconscious. Our subconscious often works things out without our even knowing, so giving it space can be good.
3. Use the week to learn something new.
Some people don’t like doing nothing. So learn something new. Spend the week learning about how to effectively market a book. Teach yourself how to sew. Pick up an old project from college and see if you can make it readable. There’s always so, so much to learn as authors, and exercising a Sabbath week doesn’t mean that we can’t still grow as writers and authors.
4. Hang out with the kids.
There’s so much inspirational creativity in our children. When we spend more time with them, some of that creativity becomes ours. We become better at what we do because of the time we take hanging out with our kids. It makes us better parents, and it makes us better writers.
And it’s so valuable to teach our children the beauty of rest. We live in such a rush-rush-rush world, and if we can model what it looks like to take a whole week off work and not worry about the money or what’s going to happen after this one week, they will learn Sabbath rest is something that’s not only possible but something that’s desirable.
5. But try not to write.
Now. I still wrote in my journal during my Sabbath, because it’s not a journal that will ever see the light of day. It’s just my unloading journal. So this wasn’t work, it was survival. I feel better when I’ve started my morning writing 800 words to get things off my chest. I could approach my Sabbath in the right frame of mind because of it.
Writing work should be put on hold for the whole seven days.
I hope you try it. I would love to hear how it goes.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
This is a really difficult season in my life. I have six kids 8 and younger (exact ages; 8, 6, 5, 3 (times two) and 7 months). That means a large portion of my time just goes toward the daily needs of my children—pouring milk, helping pack lunches, reminding them to pick up their clothes and pick out their next days’ clothes so we’re not late for school tomorrow, fixing meals, keeping the house in order, doing eight loads of laundry every week.
The list goes on and on and on.
So much of my time is spent on home and kids and husband that sometimes I grieve all that time I don’t get to spend writing (even though there’s plenty of it. Really.). I don’t get to live much in my head to work out plots or characterization or the best way to end an essay, because the time I have is writing time.
But something I have to keep reminding myself is that no season lasts forever. It will not always be this crazy, because there will be a day when all the boys will do their homework without a parent standing over them, making sure they focus. There will come a day when they will pack their own lunches without suggestions from their mama and daddy. They will take their own baths and clip their own fingernails and fold and put away their own clothes. They will solve their own problems.
Sometimes I think of that time, and I wish it here faster. Most days, though, I think of that time and I hope it stays far, far away, because there is something so special about my boys being little and knowing that I get to have them for this brief moment in time, this moment when they want to kiss me and hug me and talk to me, and I don’t ever want it to end.
So there is a rejoicing and a grieving that happens with every season’s change. We grieve that time will never turn back and yet we rejoice that time will never turn back.
Recently my 8-year-old decided to start taking showers in the mornings. He used to bathe at night, and I would sit in the bathroom with him and read a story, most recently R.L. Stine’s Goosbumps books. I grieved that I was losing that special time with him, and yet because he now does it all on his own, I have an extra 15 minutes every evening to help my other boys pick out their clothes for the next day and sign all the necessary school papers and ensure that everyone will be ready for school in the morning.
It’s not easy to remember, during the hardest seasons of our lives, that this season will not last forever. There are some seasons that don’t afford us much time for writing, and sometimes they can clamp our hearts and steal our joy, because we’re not able to live a dream in the way we think it should look, and it just feels like it will never end, all the demands and all the responsibilities and all the worry and frustration and work. It feels like that kind of season can last forever, because it’s not a fun place. But it will not last forever. No season ever does.
I got a great picture of this when I broke my foot (I fell down our stairs carrying laundry and broke my foot. It could have been much worse, the way I fell.). Sometimes, when the body is traumatized like that, it goes into a sort of depression. I fell into it hard, thinking that I would never be able to move around like I should be able to, that I would never be able to concentrate on my writing like I needed to because of the pain, that this funk would last forever.
Eight weeks later, I could walk without a foot cast. I could exercise again (with limits). I could sleep (mostly) without pain. And every week after it got better.
This season you’re in will not last forever. It’s important to remember for both the good and the bad seasons. They are seasons, and something different is already on its way.
What can make rough seasons less rough:
1. Focus only on what you can do.
When we start looking around at others’ circumstances and how they have this much time to produce that many words in a week, we are in danger of wondering why we can’t do that, too. We are different people. We have different circumstances. Some of us can produce 30,000 words in a week. Some of us are hard-pressed to crank out 5,000 words in a week. We’re all working, and that’s what matters.
Make your own schedule, for this season right now, and know that it will remain flexible, because tomorrow or next month or next year could be completely different. We must remain flexible as parent writers, always flowing with the seasons.
2. Figure out where you might be able to delegate some tasks.
We’re not made to do everything. That’s not a life in balance. If we are putting too much on our plates, we will never be able to do any of it well. That means that if I don’t have room on my plate to clean my house, I should either delegate it to someone else (a housekeeper) or be okay with letting it slide for a time. If I don’t have time to be a room mom at my kids’ elementary classroom, then I don’t have to volunteer to do it. We have to be willing to give ourselves the freedom to say no to things that may sound good on the surface but are really just crowding our plate more. We must learn the art of saying “no” or “not now.”
In the words of Jen Hatmaker: “We need to quit trying to be awesome and instead be wise.”
3. Take the pressure off this season.
The world can make us feel like we’re not doing enough, ever, but we just need to take that pressure off. Sometimes we can think we need to do just as much today as we might possibly be able to do in five years, when all the kids are in middle school. But the truth is, this time when they’re in elementary school or not in school at all, requires all hands on deck, and that means time is always short, but it doesn’t mean time will always be short forever (unless your kids play every sport imaginable). I have to let go of the pressure to produce in manic volumes that might be more possible when kids are older and I have more time to work.
Oftentimes seasons can come with their own pressure, but if we can take that pressure off, we open ourselves to the freedom of living in that particular season. We open ourselves to the joy of the season, no matter how difficult it may be. We open ourselves to flexibility and hope. We open ourselves to living with no regrets.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
I have a full manuscript out with a couple of agents. I’ve been waiting two months to hear from them, whether or not they want the manuscript or will pass so I can try submitting to someone else. I’m getting impatient. Every day I check some of the agents I follow on Twitter to see what kind of books they’re tweeting that they want to see, and every day I see something that sounds perfect for this book I’ve written. That’s out with agents. Sitting in limbo.
So then one of them tweeted about a literary middle grade novel written in verse—which is exactly what mine is—and I thought, this is too good a chance to pass up, because most agents don’t want to see novels in verse, and here was one calling for that exact submission. So I put all my submission materials together and sent it all flying across the Internet, mentioning that I’d seen his tweet and I hoped my manuscript was what he was looking for.
Not even 24 hours later, he emailed his rejection.
It knocked the breath out of me. It really did. Because he had tweeted what he wanted, and I thought I was giving him exactly that, because this novel is GREAT, and it’s interesting and it’s got the potential to change some lives in the literary sense.
And because my book was exactly the genre, exactly the format, exactly the description of what he wanted I let myself believe that his rejection meant that something was wrong with the writing mechanics. Maybe I hadn’t done as good a job as I thought communicating and crafting my story. Maybe the writing fell flat. Maybe it was really terrible, and here I was thinking it had a chance.
Except I know that none of that is true. I know it, because in seven query letters sent out, I’ve had four full manuscript requests, which has NEVER happened with any of my other stories. I know the writing is good. I know the story is great. I know the main character is lovable and quirky and mysterious and everything a lead character should be. So why did this guy pass on it so quickly?
Well, there are a lot of answers to that.
Rejection is hard. So many times we can take it so personally. Agents say “it’s just not right for my list right now,” and what we hear is, “You’re just not a good enough writer for my list.” Agents say “I don’t believe this is a good fit,” and we hear, “I don’t believe you’re a good fit.” Agents say “I’m going to have to pass,” and we hear, “It’s not any good.”
But what I’ve learned more surely from this experience is that some people will love what we write and some just won’t. There’s nothing we can do about that. If we try to please them all, we’d never have a book.
All rejection really means is that our project is not right for that one person. It doesn’t mean (necessarily) that it will never be right for anyone, ever. It doesn’t mean that we will never get traction with the project we poured ourselves into for an entire year. It doesn’t mean we have written for nothing.
Many factors influence whether or not an agent accepts a project or passes on it. Sometimes they have a similar project already in the queue, and they know it would be hard to sell two of them back-to-back. Sometimes they don’t connect well with the story, for personal reasons. Sometimes they’re looking for a very specific kind of book and yours just happens to be off by one tiny little detail.
Sometimes they don’t have the contacts that would sell your novel in the most efficient way, and even though they recognize it’s good, they’ll pass because they want you to get the best sale. Agents understand that at the heart of a publishing career is a good connection between an agent, a writer and a publishing house. If they think they can’t sell the project in a way that’s most beneficial to the writer (which will most benefit them, too), they’ll pass.
These are all the things you don’t see in a rejection letter, because agents are busy and inundated with submissions every hour of every day. There’s no way to know who would be a perfect fit and who wouldn’t without trying.
We at least have to try. That’s what I did, and even though I got an almost immediate rejection and sat in a tailspin for a couple of hours, unable to even write, eventually I lifted my head and got back to work.
Rejection will not stop me. It shouldn’t stop any of us. We are writers, first and foremost. Of course we will keep writing.
So let’s pick ourselves back up. Let’s brush off the dirt that got on our knees. Let’s keep writing.
Here’s how to see rejection for what it’s worth:
1. Remember that you are not your work.
We can become so tied to our work that it begins to feel like it’s a vital part of us. We will never have an objective viewpoint if our work is part of us. So we have to separate ourselves from it and send it out into the world without any expectation for how it will be received. Easier said than done, I know.
It’s a precarious balance when we’re writers, because the writing that holds more of us will always be better, and yet we still have to fight for this separation so we don’t take rejection too personally and close up shop forever. We should always try again.
2. Listen to the rejections.
If all the agents who send you a rejection include a note about something similar in your story that made them stop reading or showed them the project wasn’t right for them, listen. Chances are, even if you choose to self-publish that particular book, your readers will probably feel the same (because agents are, at their simplest, just readers).
That doesn’t mean we should listen to all the words in a rejection letter. Most of the rejections for my adult literary novel had to do with it being a novel in verse. If I took it out of verse, they could sell it better, they said. They didn’t have the right contacts for it, but it was beautiful writing. The story was fantastic, but they would need prose, not verse.
I decided to self-publish, because I don’t like the idea of someone telling me no one wants to read an adult novel in verse. I like proving people wrong. But mostly because taking the novel out of verse would change it in ways that wouldn’t suit it, in my opinion. (This project hasn’t published yet, by the way. I’m sitting on it for a while.)
3. Keep all your rejections, but don’t dwell on them.
Sometimes agents might include a little caveat like, “If you ever have anything else to submit, let me know and I’d love to take a look at it.” Phrases like these are golden, because they mean the agent really liked your writing, but the project simply wasn’t right for them. So keep all those rejections for the next time you have a project you’d like to submit, and you already have a much more targeted list.
4. Go have a glass of wine.
Celebrate that you were brave enough to try.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Is it better to self-publish or traditionally publish? Well, the answer is both. But it depends on the project.
Here’s a guide for the pros and cons of publishing, as far as what I know today.
1. The book release.
In traditional publishing, someone else takes care of the book release. With self-publishing, it’s all up to us.
This is a big one, for me. Right now I’ve released three books, and each of them probably took a total of about 15 additional hours to complete, beyond the writing part. Those hours were spent on things like fine-editing, laying out the books on a page (because they included pictures), getting them uploaded in all markets (which I’m still working on). If we’re not great with the technical side of the equation (I’m not!), self-publishing can seem daunting.
It’s not easy learning all that needs to be learned in order to self-publish. It’s also not quick. It’s an investment of our time, in our business. Our first few releases will take much longer than the ones that come later, because the learning curve is pretty high. But once we learn it, publishing will get much easier.
Of course, with traditional publishing, we don’t have to worry about learning any aspects of publishing, because someone else does it for us.
2. Book elements.
With self-publishing, we have more control over all the elements of our book. This would be anything from the revision process to the way the cover looks. In traditional publishing, we don’t get to pick things like who we want to design the front cover of our book. I can’t go to an agent or an editor and say, “Hey, my husband designs book covers, and I’d really like him to design this one.” Nope. They have their own people in mind.
But I can do that when I’m in charge of all aspects of book publishing.
Now, the downside to this is that if something is off—if the cover isn’t perfect but we think it looks great (because we don’t really have much expertise in design), we won’t know except by sales that just aren’t there. If there’s a typo in our book, it’s up to us. It’s not up to an editor at a publishing house.
That can feel like a lot of pressure.
When I was about to publish my books, I had a really hard time releasing them. I sat on them for weeks, because it was just so scary to release something on my own, without the benefit of having lots of eyes (agents, editors, book designers) who may have found a glaring mistake that I missed after looking it over a hundred times. Unfortunately, readers are not as forgiving when it comes to book errors if you’re a self-published author. They’re much more forgiving if you’re a traditionally published author, because they know it’s probably not your fault.
So if you’re going to self publish, the manuscript should be as close to perfect as it’s ever going to get.
3. The revision process.
In self-publishing, we have full control over the revision process. This can be a good thing. Who wants to spend years and years on a book, only to hear that someone thinks it would sell better if we took it out of first-person point of view? On the other hand, what if that information is correct, and we don’t have someone telling us?
As self-publishers, we have much more control over the revision process of our manuscript, but we also lose that contact with other people who really do know what they’re talking about. A middle grade novel I wrote is currently in the revision process with an agent, because she noticed something that could have added depth to the book. And she was right. I’m so glad she pointed it out. If I were just self-publishing the book, I might have missed adding that layer of significant meaning to my book.
And every time I get a revision request for a manuscript, I learn something new that I can apply to my self-published titles as well (which is why I enjoy being a hybrid author).
4. Marketing.
Unfortunately, there’s not much difference here between self-publishing and traditional publishing. Publishers no longer take care of advertising and marketing for their published authors, so you’re on the hook for building your own platform, either way.
5. Distribution.
Book sellers (the non-virtual kind) will not acquire your book unless you’re published through a traditional publisher. If you’re self-published, you can get those titles online as ebooks (and also pay to have them sent to people who might want to have a hard copy—but your margin of profit is much smaller on those), but you will never see them on the shelves of a book store or in a library. Even a self-published ebook that does well will not be offered in a library’s database until it’s been traditionally published.
Some people think that bookstores will be gone in the future, and we’ll just be buying books online, so maybe this doesn’t even matter. I like to think bookstores will be sticking around, and I want to have at least a few of my books on their shelves. So I’ll keep trying for traditional publishing.
6. The representation process.
This process can take a really long time. Years for some projects. Sometimes this is enough of a negative in itself. To research agents who might like my book, and produce a query letter and ready the manuscript for submission and write a synopsis probably took about 20 hours start to finish. I’m not guaranteed a return for those hours like I am if I just self-publish. And then it’s a waiting game from there. I’ve been sitting on my middle grade novel since January, still waiting to hear if two different agents want it.
7. The feeling of accomplishment.
I’d say this is the same for both. While it’s really encouraging to have someone interested in your book, to let you now that it’s not just you who thinks it’s pretty awesome, it’s also very satisfying to see your book in print and know that you did it ALL. So, either way, it’s a win.
8. Let’s not forget money.
As a self-published author, I get to keep much more of my profit (when I’m not giving books away for free). I can also give book away for free, if I choose to. In traditional publishing, you’ll get an advance (a sum of money that will “pay” for the writing of your book—usually not much if you’re a first-time author). After that advance, you won’t get any money until the publishing house recoups the publishing and distribution costs. So it could be a long time before you see any money from that. And even if you start making sales money again, the publishing house takes a cut, and so does your agent.
Of course you don’t get to keep all the money from self-publishing either—about 70 percent of the price of your book, because places like Amazon and Barnes & Noble have to pay to have your books displayed and included in search engines. But what you make, percentage-wise, is much more than you’d make publishing traditionally (only about 3-5 percent).
Now it’s up to you to decide: self-publish or traditionally publish?
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Who can resist a face like this?
Every Tuesday, on my to-do list, I have a 30-minute block that says, “Fold laundry.” This is valuable work time I’m spending separating laundry so my kids can put their piles away. Every single week I have to do it, because when you have kids, laundry never, ever stops.
The problem is, it’s time I could be cranking out 1,000 more words on my computer, and I miss it. I mis sit every single time.
This week, the laundry pile was larger, because I just changed our my 5-year-old’s clothes, because he grew out of the old size, so there were hand-me-downs that needed washing and sorted. I ended up spending 45 minutes separating piles.
And when I finally made it back to my computer, cutting the cords of home-demands, I couldn’t help but think, “Something needs to be done about this.”
It’s not easy balancing life and work and home. Because my work is creative, there are so many times I have an idea kicking around in my head, and what I really want to be doing is fleshing it out, brainstorming how it might possibly work and putting it on my production schedule in a place that might make the most sense, but kids need to be fed lunch and read stories and put down for naps, and there’s just not any extra time.
Sometimes that idea living in my brain can make my vision dark and gray, like I can’t really be happy until it comes out on the page. Sometimes it just makes me walk distracted, so I fill up cups of water for the boys and leave them on a counter instead of a table, where they’re sitting. Sometimes it means I’m not really listening to my children or staying full present or engaging in conversation or play, because there’s something else pulling my mind away.
This can be frustrating. But the truth is, when we are artists, we are always working. Always. Even in the moments when we are caring for our kids, our eyes are still open to the realities of life, to the potential for story—a conversation here, a scene there—to the conversations we’re having and the feelings we’re feeling and the experiences we might be able to use later.
At first I tried fighting this. Because I wanted to stay completely present for my children when it was my turn to care for them. Because I wanted to stay fully present with my work when it was time to work. But it wasn’t ever easy to separate myself from my art or from my children.
I’ve thought long and hard about balance in the life of a writer parent. I’ve tried to figure out an exact definition or possibilities for what it might look like or how balance might be achieved, but what I’m coming to understand is that I cannot be the kind of mom my kids need if I’m separating myself from my art at certain times and from them at others times.
I see it like this: My children are like roots, grounding me to the earth of my life. My art is like a root, too, wrapping and twisting and growing all up under and around and inside the roots that are my children. Those roots are all connected, and they don’t look perfectly orderly or perfectly distinguished one from another, but they do look perfectly beautiful.
But because they’re wrapped all around each other, if I try to pull up one of them, they all suffer.
This balance is a complicated one. And that’s okay. There are seasons when our art needs more water than our children. There are other seasons when our children need more water than our art. But they cannot ever be fully separated.
Still, if I’m honest, there is a guilt that comes crawling to me on its knees, trying to whisper in my ear that I’m not doing enough to let my kids know I love them, and I’m not doing enough to make sure my art is perfect and wonderful and life-changing, and some days I can bend too far beneath its words.
So what does work and family balance look like?
Well, sometimes it looks like inviting our family into our work, because there are days we just can’t get the work off our minds. Sometimes it looks like walking our kids to the park and forgetting that work altogether, because what we’ll see and hear on that half-mile trek informs who we are, which informs what kind of art we produce on any particular day. Sometimes it looks like working an extra hour at night while a spouse takes the kids swimming.
The other day, I sat down with my boys and drew out a new work schedule while they worked on their summer projects, picture books they’re illustrating. I was helping them, but I was also helping myself. I told them I was working out a new schedule, and they came over periodically to see what that meant, and then went right back to their art projects. They drew for 45 minutes, all of us sharing in valuable creating time.
It was not wasted time. We were creating together. We were helping each other along in our separate pursuits. Something I don’t often remember, in the guilt of the moment, is that when our kids see us creating, they get to learn what it takes to pursue a passion—the hard work, the hits-at-a-moment’s-notice inspiration, the moments when we do something unexpected because creativity just hijacked our time.
What works for me won’t always work for you, but here are a few suggestions for finding balance in work and family life:
1. Enter into creating with your kids. One of our projects this summer is creating picture books. My three older boys told a short version of a story, I wrote it in picture book form, and they’re illustration 15-30 pages we’ll transform into a picture book. This helps me practice writing picture books, and it also helps me share the wonder of art (and publishing) with my children. We get to collaborate and sharpen each other in our work together (because kids have so much to teach us about creativity).
2. Make sure you get into the habit of rest. Resting is necessary in art. Our wells can run dry if we’re not filling them. I take weekly Sabbaths every seventh week, when I try to learn something new or just read books or spend more one-on-one time with my children. We do puzzles together. We play trampoline dodgeball out back. We sew and draw and paint and sing and dance.
3. Don’t even try to keep up with it all. The demands can be great in a household like mine. I don’t even try to keep up anymore. I used to want a clean and tidy house, but now I just settle for tidy. I vacuum every week, but I dust about every month. I haven’t scrubbed the baseboards in you don’t want to know how long, because who has the time? There just aren’t enough hours in the day to spend them scrubbing something that will just get dirty again in a day of living with children. One of these days, my boys will do all of that, and we’ll have a whole work force living in our home. But for now, we just live with it.
4. Invite kids into the home stuff, too. Our boys are responsible for doing after-dinner chores. The 5-year-old even knows how to take out the trash. They wipe the table, clean the countertops, sweep the floor and do the dishes (with supervision…they like those knives that are waiting to go in the dishwasher a little too much). We shouldn’t be afraid to ask our kids for help, because when they’re out on their own (which we don’t like to think about when they’re young), they’ll have to learn how to balance life and home and art, too. We’re just giving them practice.
5. Communicate your needs. Creating art and living with a family create so many needs for communication. When those seasons come around where you just have too much on your plate, communicate that to your family. No one wants to live with a stressed-out parent, and they’ll probably be willing to help with something, whether it’s writing with you in the evenings or doing chores so you have more time to write or reading in the library until you come out of your room in the mornings and tell them it’s time to get breakfast on the table.
Balancing our work and home lives isn’t easy, but it’s definitely not impossible. We simply have to work at it, like everything else.
And it’s in our best interest that we do.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
We live in a new day and age when it comes to publishing. We can publish at the click of a button now (well, as long as we do all the work beforehand). It’s really never been easier.
We no longer have to go through agents or editors at publishing houses or wait to hear whether our book idea has market potential, because we get to define that market in the first place.
In some ways, this is good. In others, it’s a little scary.
I recently shopped out a middle grade novel to six agents I specifically hand-picked, because I read that they were interested in a novel like mine. Four of them asked for the full manuscript. Two turned down representation because they didn’t have the right contacts for it but said they’d be surprised if I didn’t find representation.
I sent a full edited version to an agent at the beginning of June, and I’m still waiting to hear her verdict: will she represent, or will she pass?
It’s been three months since the first letter I sent. In that time I’ve almost finished two more middle grade novels (for two different series), put together two books I decided to sell on my own and started work on two additional projects.
I say all this to say that the traditional publishing world is a world that takes time. Even after gaining representation for a project (which could take years), an agent then has to sell the manuscript to an interested editor at a publishing house. This could take a year. Then an editor may or may not (most likely yes) have suggestions for revisions, which could take another year, or at least several months.
After that, once it’s on a publishing schedule, it might take another year to go to print, because there are many other factors that go into print publishing, like book art, layout, and fine editing.
While all that is happening, the author is hoping that no other publishing houses come out with a similar novel that might make sales tank.
One might think this is all the more reason just to bypass traditional publishing and focus on self-publishing. And we certainly have more freedom in self-publishing. I’ve got an adult novel I’ve written in poetry that I’ve been pitching to different agents for seven months. No one will take it, even though they call the writing “beautiful”—because it’s a novel written in poetry. It’s different. It’s not standard best-seller material. Publishing is, after all, a business. That one will be self-published (just as soon as I can find the time to get it ready).
But, still, it has always been my dream to publish something the traditional way.
Why? some might say.
Well, the answer isn’t really simple for me. I’ve always dreamed of my book on shelves. And the only way you’re going to get a book on the shelves of bookstores like Barnes & Noble or the local library is by going through a traditional publisher.
I want my book in as many hands as can get it, because I believe in the story.
I believe in the adult novel, too. But after seven months of work, I know I won’t be getting representation for it, at least not without changing it significantly (namely, taking it out of verse). So I’ll take matters into my own hands and release it on my own. And maybe that means it won’t see as many hands, but eventually the right people will discover it.
For me, this debate—to publish traditionally or to self-publish—is not really a debate at all. Mostly because I want to be a hybrid author. I want to publish some works in the traditional world and others in the self-publishing world. I want to grow my audience with authentic people who actually look forward to a new release from me, whether it’s a self-published release or a traditionally published release.
The point is that I’ll keep trying to gain representation for some and I’ll go straight to self-publishing for others. The traditional market is exactly that—traditional. It doesn’t often accept cutting-edge fiction or nonfiction, so when we’re writing work that falls into that category, it’s probably just better to save our time.
Because this is, after all, a business, and the only way we can build a writing business is by constantly writing and constantly releasing. It’s hard to constantly release when the only method of release is a system that takes years to get through.
As writers who do the work, it’s smart to diversify.
Here are some questions I ask myself before considering traditional publishing or self-publishing.
1. Do I want this story to stay as-is, or would I be okay with some revision requests (sometimes very major ones)?
This is the question I asked when I received about 20 personal rejection letter (not the form ones) for my adult novel written in verse. Many said they’d take another look at it if I decided to take it out of poetry and add another 10,000 or so words. I thought about this for a while. Months. But I had another novel on deck, so, instead, I tried sending that one out and got some great response.
When it was time to revisit the adult novel, I didn’t feel like changing it at all. So I added it to my list of self-published titles, to be published soon.
2. Is this a story that I feel could withstand the long waiting period of traditional publishing?
This is sometimes a more important question for nonfiction than it is for fiction. I considered sending out a project where I did a whole year of examining family values and wrote in a diary-like fashion. Really, what it amounts to is nearly 300 essays about the family values we examined for a year. But I don’t know if that story will be able to withstand the publication schedule, because who knows how long this “trend” of intentional parenting will last? So I’ll be releasing that one as a 13-book series, beginning in November—on my own.
Some nonfiction will withstand the publication schedule because the projects are a little ahead of their time. This question helps sort out the waiting time for me.
3. Could I gain enough support through my own store than through a publisher’s store?
Some stories (like series) are much easier to sell as self-published authors. With series, there’s a natural lead-in to the other stories. But sometimes I don’t want to write series. Sometimes I just want to write a stand-alone novel (the middle grade one out with agents right now is a stand-alone).
Self-published authors have a much harder time selling their stand-alone novels, because they don’t exist in what’s called a funnel (a natural funnel to more sales). We can create funnels for them, but I didn’t want to do that with this one. Because of that, I most likely wouldn’t be able generate great sales as a self-published author.
So I continue to wait.
For writers, this debate can get pretty complicated. Some say self-publishing is the only way. Some say traditional publishing is the only way. But I don’t think it has to be one or the other. There are definite advantage to both processes (I’ll share those in next week’s post).
It’s worth it to ask ourselves which would be better, not for all our projects, but for one project at a time.
