"I" is for Internet

For my "I" post for the A-Z Blogging Challenge, I am paying homage to something I have a love/hate relationship with.

The internet.

There's a quote floating around (and an accurate one, at that) that says, "Writing is 3% talent and 97% not being distracted by the internet."  I would give credit for whoever said it, but I've seen it on Twitter from about fifteen different people, so too bad.

But it's true.  The internet is a funny thing.  It's a powerful writing tool.  I can do research, look up publishing houses and agent information, find pictures for inspiration for my characters, find a geographical location for a setting, and get the correct spelling of words I should already know.

I can also screw around on Facebook, window shop on Amazon, sell my crap on eBay, download music on iTunes, check what Kim Kardashian is up to on Perez Hilton, look up awesome pictures to use for my blog posts (c'mon, you guys have seen the hilarity), and tweet until my fingers fall off.

Yeah.

That leads to a very productive day.

*snort*

Of course I do all those things...but, I've learned that sometimes I need to remove myself.  I will often pack my work up, laptop and all, and head to the nice library in the neighboring town.  Sure, they have free WiFi, but having to keep it to a dull roar minimizes my urge to watch silly videos on YouTube and actually get writing done.  Because, quite frankly, if I didn't have some measure of self-control, I'd never get anything completed.  And my goal is to be a professional writer, not a professional internet surfer; though, if there was money in that, I might give it a shot.

I know some of you are wondering why I don't use a typewriter or hand-write more things.  The answer is that I like instant gratification, and little patience for typewriters.  Also, if you've seen my handwriting, you'd probably insist that I not be allowed to use a pen ever again.  My husband tells me I need a translator, and recently I've taken to re-tracing notes I've made to figure out what some of the words are supposed to be.  It's faster for me to use a computer, trust me on that one.

What is your strategy to avoid the distraction of the internet?

xoxo Sarah

"B" is for Blog

Sorry for the lame title for this post, but continuing on with the A-Z Blogging Challenge, I wanted to do an entry on what I'm doing right now.

Literally.

Blogging.

It boggles my mind.

I have a blog...

And people are reading it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, cat. I'm shocked, too.

I've been blogging about my experiences as an aspiring author for less than a month, and it still seems strange to me.  I never thought I'd have a blog.  None of my hobbies are so incredibly fascinating that I needed to share them with everyone: I like to read; exercise; spend time with my husband, friends, and cats; shop.  And it seemed like all the good blog ideas were either too much trouble or already taken - I wasn't about to maroon myself on a deserted island that magically had WiFi and talk about my sunburn, and though I love to cook, I didn't have an urge to work my way through Julia Child's cookbook over the course of a year...

Anyway, it wasn't until I made the conscious decision to get myself published that I realized I had no idea how to market myself, and when I did start to give it some thought, it became clear that I didn't even know where to begin.  Part of it was that I wasn't thinking like a 21st century author.  My brain was still stuck in the literary dark ages.  Obviously, back in the day, Charles Dickens wouldn't be posting YouTube book trailers for A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist on his blog and Facebook, then taking to his Twitter account and tweeting the links so a wide a range of people could see them.  If the "greats" didn't use this newfangled "blog" thing, what good would it do me?

I had to see it in action.

The whole blogging process didn't even begin to seem like a good idea until some friends I'd met in the writing community (the lovely Jennifer DeLucy and Laura Kaye, among others) began finishing their own manuscripts and chronicling their journeys to publication on their own blogs.  I found myself reading them, and, more importantly, I found myself identifying with a lot of what they were posting about.

It was then that it hit me: Blogging would allow me to find others like myself who were in similar situations.  Other newbie word-smiths who were struggling to make their word counts, send queries to agents and publishers, getting rejections, receiving acceptances...I could learn from them, and they could learn from me.  The realization that blogging could be something other than an elaborate online diary overcame me with the fierce intensity of teenage girls chasing after Justin Bieber.


This, I could do.

Blogging about my own experiences as a fledgling writer could help me reach out to others and give them access to me as well, not to mention gaining some perspective on what was happening in my own writer-world.  I can't imagine that Charles Dickens had a large group of fellow authors he could contact and learn from, and not only because life expectancy was pretty low at the time. Distance, lack of an invention called the "telephone" (which wouldn't be around until the late 1870's), and language barriers...I'll bet Dickens had to deal with all that, just to find some like-minded souls.  Even though he lived abroad for a while and even visited America, for all intents and purposes, if a writer wasn't in England within a reasonable distance from him, he wasn't going to meet them.

I'd like to imagine that he would have blogged.

Still, I dug my heels in and didn't start one until recently.  Why?  I don't really know.  But now my eyes are open, and I'm prepared to embrace blogging for the amazing tool that it is: a record of struggles, highlights, connections, kudos, rants, promotion and information.

Because I wanted to keep this entry relatively short, I did want to mention that blogging is also a wonderful medium to use to connect to people who might be interested in your work...either future readers, agents, or even publishers.  Not to mention Twitter, Facebook, and websites, but perhaps we'll save those for another day.

xoxo Sarah