New Blog

I know I've been a little lax about keeping up with this blog in the past, but this week I followed my heart and started a Bible blog. I put it up on Wordpress, and it's called Revolutionary Faith. If you wish to read it, visit http://revolfaith.com.

Right now, I'm in the middle of posting about my faith experience. However, I'll still be posting stuff here about my personal thoughts. I have a post in mind that I'd like to write soon. This blog is well over three years old now, and I don't have plans to abandon it anytime soon. :-)

Thanks for reading!

Health and Nutrition Alert

For my readers concerned about health and nutrition, there is a non-profit organization functioning as the front group for restaurants and food manufacturers that is feeding misleading health and nutrition information to consumers through numerous websites and expensive ad campaigns. You can read about it here in my latest article on Suite 101.

Thanks for reading!

Changes

Dear Readers,

As you may notice, I've made some small changes to the blog. You can now subscribe to the blog through email. There's also a feed to my most recent freelance articles on Suite101 and most popular blog posts if you'd like to check those out. For those of you on Twitter, I now have a Twitter account to promote my freelance writing. If you wish to follow, you may find me @April_Kelsey. I've been doing quite a bit of writing these days, including working on my novels, so I've been very busy! After all, I'm doing this while raising a toddler!!

Also, for those of you who blog about dealing with depression, life in general, or nutrition and eating disorders, I'd like to start a blog roll to feature your blogs (since I just can't follow everyone.) If you'd like to see your blog promoted on mine, leave a comment on this post with a link to your site. I don't know when I'll be able to get the blog roll up, but I'd like to do it within the next week or two.

I've considered adding Adsense to my blog to pull in some extra revenue; however, I started this blog as more of a way to express myself and reach out to others, not to capitalize on my writing. So for now, I will keep this blog ad-free. Let me know what you think. As always, I appreciate your readership!

Busy with the Keyboard

In the absence of an available job, I've decided to start writing freelance. My first article was published today, and I'm very excited. If you have time, please stop by and check it out.

Thanks for reading!

Querying

I queried nine agents last night to represent my first novel, and I think my eyes might bleed. Querying agents is probably the most stressful thing an author ever does. You can cry reading passages of your novel, then as soon as you sit down to query, it seems everything you have ever written is utter, boring dreck. You think, "Who in their right mind would accept this?" You want to suddenly hurl your manuscript into the nearest bonfire, forever away from the eyes of the literary world, except that manuscript represents five years of work and a potential advance large enough to pay off your student loans. And your husband would kill you for throwing it out.

So you write a query. And rewrite it. And rewrite it again. You send it out while agonizing over every single word. Literary agents are notoriously picky. I read their blogs, so I know. Does my query have too many adverbs? Is my bio a turn-off? Should I have spent less space describing the plot and more space on how the book fits into the literary genre?

If I spent the next two months perfecting my query, I still wouldn't have answers to these questions. The only test of its quality is to subject it to the rigid scrutiny of people who hold all my pitiful hopes in their dry, meaty hands. If it fails, I'll tweak it further and start the whole miserable process over again--just to find someone who will love my novel enough to bring it into existence.

Driven to Distraction

Well, I finally did it. I found a car I love! It's a silver 2007 Ford Fusion with black leather seats. It is SWEET beyond belief. Every time I climb in, I feel like a queen. Now if I could just figure out how to mount the baby mirror in the back seat....

I haven't been blogging much because, aside from car shopping, I'm making some much-needed changes to my first manuscript. So far, I've added about four pages of material, and I'm only up to page 70 or so in the tweaking process. After this, I'll print off two copies or so and begin querying literary agents again. I just about have my query perfected, too. The problem with this process is that it takes FOR-EV-ER!

Seriously, there are much better uses for one's time than writing books--not for J. K. Rowling, obviously, but for everybody else, absolutely. Getting published is like winning the lottery after busting your brains for 2+ years to buy the ticket--and then you must collect the money from the Italian Mafia. I'm not joking. It's THAT difficult. I could get near the end of this process only to discover that I've written a story no one wants to buy or read. My 260-page manuscript could end up on a shelf, unpublished, collecting dust for the next two decades. But for now, I can't think those kinds of thoughts. I've only queried 10 agents. Some writers wallpaper their bedrooms with rejection letters before they find someone who is interested in representing their work. That's the kind of effort I need to give.

The baby? Well, he's fine. He's been a bit fussy since getting his first vaccine shots. I think, though, that he's getting bored with playing on the floor all day. If I take him out for a walk in the stroller or bring him along in the car to run errands, he's a perfect angel. If I put him on his activity mat, he's fussing after an hour--not great for writing and studying. But I guess I didn't have him to help me with my writing, now did I?

Really, I can't remember why I had him...but I'm glad I did. His smiles make my days a little brighter. And now I'm thinking, maybe I should have another?

?!?

Speaking of babies, I'd like to say congratulations to my friends, Jessica and William, on the birth of their first child, a beautiful little girl. My husband and I met Jess and Will in South Carolina nearly two years ago, and Jess became my first follower on this blog. I know they are thrilled to be new parents!

Crash

I should be sleeping. I'm exhausted, and William is actually content at the moment. Talk about a tough week. Last weekend, William went from eating every three hours to crying for food every two hours and less. I'd finish feeding him, put him down to play, and he'd be crying again within a half hour. So, my husband and I decided to start him on rice cereal. Now instead of crying every two hours, William sometimes takes two hours to feed! Up until last night, I hadn't touched my beads in nearly a week.

I sometimes hate being a Navy wife. I often feel alone, and I'm responsible for so much. This crew my husband is on isn't helping matters any. He came home a couple of weeks ago and said his section might be assigned duty every six days instead of four, which meant he would only be away one night a week instead of two. Then he came home this week and said his section will probably be assigned duty every other day, which meant he'd be home only three nights a week. Now the word is he'll stay on the four-day duty rotation, but he has to work an extra two hours a day. Needless to say, I'm feeling a bit jerked around at this point.

I still haven't heard from half of the literary agents I have queried so far. All the other responses have been "no". I'm not feeling very hopeful about my chances. After bugging me to finish the manuscript, my mom isn't going to read it. Neither is my husband. In fact, I'm not sure anyone is reading it right now. If my family doesn't want to read it, why would anyone else? Maybe I should go the way of Rowling and Paolini and write the next blockbuster YA fantasy series.

I could use a better week.

An Old Flame

Ah, yes. Twenty-seven. Three years away from 30.

In the midst of discovering the joys of motherhood, this thought has haunted me.

I thought I'd be so much more accomplished by now. Forget sipping lattes in Europe. I've yet to start my career--whatever that might be.

I've gone back and forth on career choices for ages: lawyer, psychologist, English teacher, full-time novelist. Every time I think I'm close to a final decision, the process starts all over again. My husband would have gone insane by now listening to me change my mind over and over, except he does the exact same thing. *Sigh*

I need to bite the bullet at some point. It just seems so final, and what if I don't like it?

I really wish I had my old tutoring job back. It didn't pay as well as I hoped it could, but helping students to develop such an important skill as writing really excited me. And I miss my colleagues.

So since I can't commute all the way to South Carolina, I've done the next best thing: I've started a blog so I can tutor through the Web. You can check it out at http://gn-guide.blogspot.com. The "gn" stands for Grammar Nazi. You know it.

Don't worry, though. I'll still be posting here as well. Thanks for reading.

The Following Game

I've recently noticed that I've acquired new followers. Welcome to my blog! I'm so happy to have you.

Last week, however, I experienced a case of disappearing followers. I logged in one day to 42 followers. Next day, 41. Day after, 42. Day after that, 41. I was perplexed until I realized that people were finding me through an old post I had put up in the community "coffee shop" nearly a year ago, asking if anyone blogged about depression. It also dawned upon me that these fellow bloggers had joined my blog expecting me to follow theirs in return.

Oh, dear. I guess I should explain myself.

When I started this blog nearly a year ago, I was indeed interested in finding other bloggers who wrote about their struggles with depression. My hope was to network with others and possibly make some friends. In a way, I was successful. I found a few good blogs to join that were interesting and insightful. Occasionally I still find and follow great blogs. Just the other day, in fact, I began following "She Became a Butterfly," the blog of a young mother like myself who deals with depression on a daily basis.

However, I refuse to participate in the following game. First of all, If I followed people's blogs just to get them to follow me, I'd have hundreds of blogs on my dashboard crowding out the few I really want to read.

Second, most people don't understand that I'm extremely picky when it comes to following any sort of blog, no matter what the topic. Grammatical correctness is HUGE with me. There's only so much I'm willing to tolerate as far as impediments to understanding the blog's content, and lack of punctuation is one barrier I can't get around. I can stomach the occasional run-on sentence, but run-on paragraphs are O-U-T. (If you have more than four lines of text with only one period, you are wrong!) I've spent so much time working as a writing tutor that when I read jacked-up paragraphs, my brain spends more time correcting the errors than processing the content, which turns what should be pleasurable reading into an exercise in futility. It drives me absolutely nuts.

A blog's content also has to be on the up-and-up before I will follow it. Good blogs that deal with depression are hard to come by in my opinion. In this case I make a distinction between depression and teenage angst. If you're experiencing irrational feelings of sadness and guilt, great. If you're just whining because you think everyone in high school hates you, tough. Complaining is to be expected on depression blogs, but endless whining makes me homicidal. Poorly written emo poetry does, too. Don't just talk about your feelings--talk about how you are dealing with them, how you are growing (or hope to grow) as a person. I'm looking for writing that shows some sort of emotional maturity--or at least a little personality.

And I still pass up on decent blogs all the time just because they don't really interest me. Maybe the content is a little too fluffy or too bland--maybe the writing style just doesn't appeal to me. That's ok. People pass over my blog all the time for the exact same reasons. I don't hold it against them. After all, variety is the spice of life.

If you're following my blog, thank you. If I'm following your blog, feel free to feel flattered. :-)

Craziness!

So now that my novel is officially complete, I've been seeking out literary agents to represent it. I emailed four yesterday and plan to email six more within the next few days. Ever tried writing a professional query with a baby screaming in the background? Not fun. It took all day. I should hear something back from the agents within a month...if I hear anything at all. If I don't hear anything, the process begins again with another 10 agents. Oh, goody.

In the meantime, I'm preparing for my mother to arrive tomorrow. I'm really excited about her visit: this is the first time she'll get to hold her grandson, and I will surprise her with a copy of my manuscript. The apartment, however, is a mess, and I want to clean house like I want a needle in my eye.

Just another day in paradise! :-)

Super Sunday

So, the Saints won the Super Bowl. Even if you cheered for the Colts, I'm not sure you could come away too disappointed with that result. Those guys on the Saints team were so excited to win. People in New Orleans were dancing in the streets. It was a night to remember.

Especially for me. First of all, I managed to blow half a jar of cheese sauce all over the inside of the microwave while making nachos for the game. It was probably the most epic mess I've ever made and took all of the third quarter to clean up. Second, I finished my novel.

Yeah, you heard me.

Fifty-nine thousand words and 259 pages. It is finished at last!

I suppose at the moment I typed the words "The End" I could have been more excited. I always imagined myself leaping from my chair and doing a sort of "endzone" dance while screaming incoherently. But at the moment of truth, I felt incredibly calm. I actually felt more excited about it yesterday when I took the manuscript to Office Depot to have it printed and bound. Seeing it in hard copy took my breath away. (I mean, it's over half a ream of paper!)

Now I just have to find a publisher. Maybe I'll save my endzone dance for that.

I thought long and hard about whom I would dedicate my novel to. There's my husband who is always encouraging me to reach my goals...my best friend, whom I consider my writing partner-in-crime...my mother, who is my biggest motivator...my mother-in-law, who deeply admires my writing...and my high school mentor, who is probably my most avid fan. There are so many people who have inspired me to reach this point, and whom I can't thank enough for all their support.

But in the end, only one possibility made sense to me: dedicate it to my newborn son. After all, my progeny will ultimately inherit my legacy and the result of all my accomplishments. And I believe it was the act of following through on my pregnancy and bringing him into the world that inspired me to follow through on completing my novel.

Yet I couldn't leave out all the others who helped me through the bulk of the project. So my dedication is thus:

To my son, and all those who have believed in me.

And now my son requires a feeding. Thanks for reading.

Advice for New Bloggers

No offense to anyone in particular; just had to get this out of my system.

1. You can't gain 30+ followers after publishing your first post.

Attracting followers takes time. Most readers want to see you well established before they commit to following. Many new bloggers abandon their blogs after the first few posts or run out of quality material. If you're serious about blogging, stick with it. Followers will come, but weeks may pass before you see decent numbers.

2. Don't fall for the "I'll follow you if you follow me" trap.

I can almost guarantee that these types of followers aren't reading your blog (which means they won't be leaving comments, either). They are simply using you to try to illegitimately boost their standing within the blogging community. News flash: it never works. Plus, your dashboard will end up cluttered with bad blogs that you'll never read...and the moment you drop them, they'll drop you!

3. Feel free to advertise your blog, but don't beg for readers.

Begging just makes you look desperate and immature, and is usually taken as a sign that the blog's content is sub par. Good writers don't need to beg.

4. Don't insult your target audience.

Seems like a no-brainer, but I've run into more than one blogger who did this routinely, and had few to no followers to show for it. Telling your readers that they're wrong or stupid only (surprise!) alienates them. People read blogs to be informed, entertained, or inspired--not to be lectured or ridiculed.

5. Paragraph spacing, length, grammar, spelling, punctuation, font color, layout and blog design count almost as much as content.

A black background with neon green font may look cool to you, but it's murder on the eyes. (Several fellow bloggers have admitted to me that they refuse to follow any blogs published on a black background, no matter how stellar the content.) Same goes for pastel fonts on a white background, blogs written in size 6 Times New Roman, or huge blocks of text that go on forever. Posts without punctuation, however, are the worst offenders in my book. A period indicates that a sentence (or thought) has ended. If your sentences never end, I cannot process the information--nor will I attempt to. If you want to be a writer, bring something of the craft to the table.

6. Shakespeare hates your emo poems, and so do I.

Yes, we all get it: your life is circling the yawning abyss of angst and darkness. But people can only read so much badly constructed verse about the waves of isolation sweeping over your soul before they want to gouge their eyes out with a shrimp fork. Vary it up once in a while with a fresh perspective or a different topic. Use allegories or metaphors. Better yet, study up on the craft of poetry. A creative rhythm or rhyme scheme, a clever use of vocabulary, or a profound insight can suck me in like a Hoover upright. Otherwise, I'm not interested.

7. Post regularly, but not obsessively.

It's true: the more often you publish, the more often your blog will come up when readers click the "Next Blog" button on the Blogger toolbar. But publishing five times a day isn't going to help you gather followers any faster. In fact, it may actually drive followers away! Many readers follow several blogs at once, and they don't have time to read a blog that features several posts a day. Plus, in my experience, obsessive bloggers tend to quickly run out of quality material, ramble, or publish posts that are too short and utterly meaningless. Quality always trumps quantity in the quest for followers.

8. To gain followers, become a good follower.

Posting sincere comments on other writers' blogs often leads readers to your blog. The key word here is "sincere." Don't use another's comment box simply as advertising space for your own work. Instead, provide positive feedback on what that blogger has written. Doing so will earn you the respect of other bloggers and increase your exposure within the community. In time, fellow bloggers may begin promoting your blog of their own volition.

Keep up the good writing!

Maybe Jesus does like me

Luckily, my horrible day didn't turn out to be so horrible after all. The Xbox 360 is fine. My husband came home and discovered I had just knocked a cable loose. I managed to get my car mirror straightened out. My boss's request for another grammar book may have been canceled, leaving me free to finish my novel this summer. There's still epoxy on my dashboard and I don't have a single doctor's appointment yet, but, overall, things are looking up.

I started reading a biography on Jonathan Swift, most famously known as the author of Gulliver's Travels, by Victoria Glendinning. Right off the bat, I became enamored with her prose. It's sort of eighteenth-century classic English meets new modern with a little Jackie Kennedy thrown in. I would kill to hear either James Earl Jones or Garrison Keillor narrate it. Ms. Glendinning supposedly has only one work of fiction on the market, entitled Flight: A Novel, and I can't wait to crack it open.

Writer's envy. It's a monster. Today, in between tutoring students on the last day of class, I spent time promoting my blog online. I discovered many bad blogs with many followers and several good blogs with less than three followers. Unfortunately, I'm painfully aware that my writing is not particularly interesting. Sharp wit and gripping prose elude me in a chronic sort of way. Which probably means that if I do manage to get published, I won't be fully appreciated until after I've died penniless, and then my dry-as-dust prose will be forced almost as a type of unusual punishment upon countless stone-faced, glassy-eyed liberal arts students who probably won't read it after all, but will just look up the plot summary on SparkNotes.

*Sigh* I suppose it's better to die hated than to die in obscurity. I'm sure some famous person said that.

That's Life...

Despite enduring some of the physical symptoms of PMDD, I was excited about reporting to work today. I recently wrote a grammar guide at my supervisor's request for the students at the writing center where I work, and today was the day I was to receive feedback on the project. If all goes well, it could be published by this fall--my first published work.

I felt a great sense of relief as I walked into my supervisor's office with the finished copy of the guide in hand. The 45-page booklet had taken about two months to write and format, and I had delayed working on my novel to complete it. With the project finished, I could finally begin hammering out the final chapters on my fiction manuscript. However, my relief in this regard was short-lived. My supervisor and the center's director loved the guide so much that they are commissioning my skills for another guide--this time, one with a football theme. And it has to be finished by the end of May. Oy. Now I'm scrambling to finish my novel, because I refuse to put it off for another project. I guess I shouldn't complain; after all, I'm actually managing to get things done and being recognized for my work.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying my new blogging venture. I had thought about starting a personal blog for months, but put it off because I was unsure what to write about. I considered everything from writing book reviews to reviewing local restaurants. I couldn't think of anything that I could sustain over a significant period of time. Then I thought about my life: I'm a writer trying to break into the publishing scene while emotionally supporting a husband in the U.S. Navy, trying for a baby, and occasionally battling depression. Before the end of the year, we will move to one of five different naval bases, each one at least a thousand miles away from our families. If that alone can't compel me to bare my soul, I should probably give up writing for good.

Writer's Angst

It's been a rough day. I've spent most of the day unnaturally tired and trapped within a numb mind. I failed to add a single word to my novel. My dear husband is snoozing away next to me, reminding me of just how tired I am, and I've started this darn blog over three times in the past half hour.

I keep thinking about this chapter I wrote in my novel yesterday. I haven't decided yet if it is good or not. Basically, the story goes like this: a black man has been caring for his mentally disabled cousin for most of his life, until said cousin is wrongly accused of murder. The cousin is sent away to an asylum, where he is mistreated by the staff. The town's white sheriff, who is the black man's best friend, arranges to bring his cousin home until a new place can be found for him. In the meantime, the the town's old KKK rises up in protest and does something terrible. The black man then decides to leave town, but will abandon his cousin in the process. His only solution: he must kill his cousin.

I wrote this whole scene where the man walks into his cousin's room, kneels in front of where he is sitting, and holds the gun to his temple. The idea for this chapter just came to me out of nowhere, and it seemed somehow poignant and necessary to the novel's progress. The problem is, the description is very, very simplified. The question isn't where or how I should beef it up, it's whether I should. In spite of everything going on in my brain, all I can focus on is this scene. Maybe I should just sleep on it for tonight.

The Writer's Life

Today was a pretty good day. I actually managed to work on my novel, the progress on which seems to slow more and more as I near the end. I can now count on one hand the number of chapters that remain. Now if I could just finish it before this Christmas....

Seriously, I have changed the deadline for this book at least three times. At first, I said it would be completed by August, 2008. Then my father-in-law, whom I loved very much, passed away. As a result, I spent the next month mentally and emotionally paralyzed. Needless to say, I didn't do much writing. Then I said it would be finished by Christmas. Then New Years. Then February. After that, I decided to keep my mouth shut on the subject and let it be finished when it gets finished. Hopefully, that will be soon--as long as life doesn't find another way of interrupting me.

In the meantime, I'm thinking about entering some poetry contests to get my name out on the writer's circuit. I went to work on my trusty Writer magazine's list of contests with a highlighter, then hauled out my binder of poems. I was soon hit with a shocking realization: I've written a lot of crap. And I don't mean crap in the generic sense. Some of my poems are truly awful. Out of a collection of nearly 100, I managed to dig out about six that might be worthy of publication. That's the downside of being a writer--you end up throwing out most of the stuff you write. Yet, in a way, it's good. Being able to look back over old work and judge it with a mature and critical eye shows how much your knowledge and skills as a writer have grown. And while I can't exactly take that ability to the bank, at least it could help me get there.