Category: FYI

Friday Morning FYI – 3/8/2019

Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI – my chance to share observations/rants in short, easy-to-consume form.

“How do you come up with your ideas and stories?” is a question writers get all the time. There’s no checklist of ways, but this screenshot kind of sums it up:

Loneliness defined

My girlfriend is a scientist. In a wonderful speakeasy in Montreal this past weekend, halfway through mixed drink #2, I somehow set her off to talking about free radicals (seriously, I have no idea how that happened). After she said “Combustion is never complete”, a siren went off in my head, so I whipped out my phone to take notes. At “Free radicals are desperate to increase stability” I knew I had something, but not about chemistry or biology. See the title of my note?

And that happens to me all the time. I’m that writer who will die with fifty story ideas unwritten. But where does that come from? That’s this week’s FYI:

Storytellers are programmed to discover inspiration, and can find stories and twists in anything. It’s not witchcraft, and, to be honest, is exhausting, but every now and then the mundane world sparks something cool in our heads, like lonely free radicals looking for love. Where it goes from there is up in the air. It might end up being an analogy a character uses, the central theme of a novel, or just something fun to share with writer friends. What’s important is having an inspiration-seeking mindset.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

PS – If any of those bullets are inaccurate, don’t @ me, science people. It was a dark bar and my gf was talking fast. If an idea begs to be used, that’s what research is for 😀

 

Friday Morning FYI – 2/22/2019

Ron Delaney Jr2 Comments

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI (something-like-a-year-since-the-last-one-of-these edition) – my chance to share observations/rants in short, easy-to-consume form.

I recently had a short story published (*shameless self back pat* – won 1st place) in a new annual anthology competition called The Bould Awards. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme and came after years of submissions, but it let me create an Amazon author page, which is kind of cool.

That got me thinking about all the paths to publishing available to writers today. It used to be that you’d type out your work (good god, how did people write anything without BACKSPACE, Cut > Paste, etc.?), somehow get the name of a publishing agent, stick your work in a yellow envelope, hand it to a smiling neighborhood postman, and pray. Now we’ve got blogs and online profiles, email, content-formatting submission forms, Twitter contests, live-pitching at conferences, small press open calls, Wattpad, hybrid publishing, a hundred forms of self-publishing, etc. This is good and bad, of course. With availability comes opportunity, but also mountains of content for decision makers to weed through and for your work to be compared against. Still, what a world!

That brings us to this week’s FYI:

The only thing worse for your art than comparing your work/struggles/achievements to someone else’s is assuming there’s only one path to whatever you define as success. Everyone’s golden ring is different. If you have one book in you, there’s options. If you have ten books in you or a bunch of short stories or fifty pieces of flash fiction or a poetry collection, same answer. Don’t get hung up on someone else getting picked over you for a contest, writer friends around you landing agents or selling short stories, or whatever. Focus on you and your art, craft it as best you can, and learn from every new sentence/paragraph/page/chapter/story. In the end the most important thing is to persist along your path, not trace anyone else’s.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Friday Morning (er, Saturday afternoon?) FYI – 2/9/2018

Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI – my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

Ass I write this, I realize I’m butting up against overwhelmed-ness. I’m finalizing my novel for querying, working on several other writerly projects, and have a mountain of day job stuff going on. I’ve also signed-on to teach goat yoga (not a typo) on weekends, have to get my condo ready to be rented, and will be doing a ton of submission reading for a writer contest starting soon.

And that’s okay. In fact, it’s kind of awesome. That’s this week’s FYI:

I believe if you don’t go to bed exhausted you’ve wasted some part of your day. Always better to have more to do than less. Leisure time is healthy, of course, but only after accomplishing something. I’m going to accomplish a lot in the next few months. Or fail. Either way, I’ll be able to look back and know I didn’t sit on my hands through any of it. That’s a reward in itself.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Friday Morning FYI – 2/2/2018

Ron Delaney Jr1 Comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI (I’m-in-Sao-Paolo-Brazil-recovering-from-a-beef-hangover edition) – my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

Last week, I FYI-ed my writer chums about being patient with revisions, relaying how it’s taken me nearly a year to revise my latest book. A friend reached out and recommended I take that post down because “You shouldn’t post about your writing or revision process. Agents are going to reject you if they read that and think you do things you shouldn’t.” If you’ll indulge me (if not, close the tab now) I’d like to address that concern.

First, no matter how much some perpetuate the myth, agents aren’t heartless monsters combing the interwebz for reasons to reject you when you eventually query them. Nuff said.

Second, I don’t plan to take a year revising any book I’ll write going forward. For the two books I queried before my current novel, I made mistakes in both the writing and the revising (and so, subsequently, the querying). Taking extra time with book three allowed me to identify where I’d gone wrong process-wise with the first two. What I learned will prevent me from now making certain mistakes in the first place, and write/revise smarter and more efficiently.

Last, writers should blog/tweet/whatever about their experiences, because we can all learn something from each other. We’re all students and teachers in this mad escapade of trying to line up 100K words in a pleasing order. Play nice and share.

Oh yeah, I need an FYI. Hmm. Maybe this… :

Don’t be afraid of agents, grow beyond your mistakes, share what you know.

That’ll do.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Friday Morning FYI – 1/26/2018

Ron Delaney Jr1 Comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI – my chance to share observations/wisdom/rants in short, easily consumed form.

I’m not generally one for broad catch phrases, but ‘It’ll be done when it’s done’ is one I like. As both a writer and trainer, I see a lot of impatience. Writers make up deadlines for finishing revisions, folks think they can be trained to an expert level on something in a day, etc. Were I not such a well-rounded human, it would be upsetting.

Still, I feel for those who impose unrealistic deadlines, writers in particular. I know how stressful that can be, because I used to do it. I wrote a book a year for three years straight. Queried the first two way before I should have, because I declared them done before they were, and because ‘I had to’ according to some dates I’d made up. I finished the first draft for the third in late 2016, and still haven’t sent it out wide. Some will call that dragging my feet, but I’ve worked on the book the whole time, doing everything I can to make it great rather than rushing it out the door at ‘good enough’ just to get rejected because it wasn’t.

And it’s so much better than it was a year ago, or six months ago, or three.

That leads us to this week’s FYI:

Sure, deciding to finish a first draft in six months is a good idea (here’s another phrase: ‘Just finish it’), but first drafts are normally a mess anyway. Revising your novel (one more: ‘Writing is re-writing’) will take much longer. Accept that.

You aren’t going to take your book from mess to awesome after one beta reader and a couple weeks of edits. You’re not.

No, you don’t have to query in February, or any other month for that matter. That’s in your head.

No, you shouldn’t pitch your book if you finished the first draft a month ago. Or two. Or probably three.

Don’t be so hard on yourself, and don’t rush (last one: ‘A writer’s worst enemy is impatience’). If you’re story is badass, agents and editors will love it when it’s razor sharp. Don’t risk them passing it over when it’s butter knife dull.

Huh, I guess I like catch phrases more than I thought.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}