Literary Goodies (A Gift List for Writers)

It's almost back to school time, and you know what that means? Shopping. And you know what shopping means? Buying ourselves presents, of course!

(Or maybe that's just my logic but, oh well!)

So this week, I'm lightening up on the writing advice and instead bringing you a list of my favorite literary inspired gifts for yourself or the writer you know. Hold on to your wallets, literary scholars, here we go!

1. Let's start with the most expensive and the most epic pick first. It's the Luxury Club Library Bookcase Chair by Alexander Love Designs in Brooklyn, NY. You can find it on ETSY. Wouldn't this be the best chair to sit in, surrounded by your love of books, your literary idols, your favorite tomes? Now picture yourself with a mug of coffee in one hand and your laptop poised on your lap, bursting with perfect prose. It's an ideal world in the Bookcase Chair. I just know it is. However, it will set you back about $2,950.00. So....put it on the list for when you get your first publishing advance :)

2. This next gift is a recent find of mine, but I absolutely LOVE this company and their wit. It's the Soap for Writer's Block by Whiskey River Soap Co. The site's description of the soap is amazing:
 " If this soap doesn’t help you churn out regurgitated ideas and probably a vampire, I’ll eat my hat. It’s a fedora, by the way. Cool vampires wear fedoras now. Put that in your crack pipe and smoke it. Or in your book. Either way, you’re gonna need this soap ASAP. Your ideas are terrible."
Another of my favorite, definitely fueled to writers, is the Soap for Introverts. It's "a handcrafted bar dyed with a blend of nonconfrontational ocean blues. And we didn’t bother scenting it. Because seriously, it’s not like you’re going anywhere anyway, right?" 
They also churn out soaps to help you get into character like the Soap for Evil Dictators scented with the plight of the people, Soap for Geeks, and Soap for Hipsters.
Feeling a little dry after all this talk of bathing? Whiskey River Soap Co. makes all their scents into candles, because who has the time to stop wallowing in their own writer's block for a shower? Simply light, lean back, and let the ideas flow.

3. We've covered places to sit and things to smell, but every writer needs something to wear (that isn't pajamas). Here enters Appraising Pages and their shop of wonderful book-inspired t-shirts, jewelry, and extras (like this Albus Dumbledore banner). My favorite, and one that I've really been wanting to buy - HINT HINT gift givers in my life - is their Support Authors tee. Nothing says "I'm a starving artist" like daily encouragement of complete strangers to buy our books. Self-aggrandizing? Maybe. A beautiful option to wear to the store other than holey cotton shorts and a plaid shirt? Yes.

4. Need a little motivation? Check out Steal Like and Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon at Amazon. It's a great read for anyone who's looking to navigate creativity and creation in the digital age, anyone who needs to defend "where they got their ideas" to family members, and for those who are plum out of ideas.

5. Finally, the last gift on the list is something useful to eating and drinking the hours away while you rework that plot point in chapter three. I'm talking specifically of the mugs from The Literary Gift Company. Now, The Literary Gift Company isn't limited to mugs. They also sell apparel, jewelry, housewares, stationary, books, cards, and reading accessories. Pretty much a writers dream, right? Well, it gets better. Their mugs include the Penguin classics like Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Grammar Mugs, and mugs that ask you please Go Away, I'm Writing and come with chocolate, so you won't have to leave your writing spot all day. Best of all, though, they carry Personalized Book Cover Mugs, where you choose the title and the author's name. I'm sure this was created to please those who love Penguin books they don't carry in their other listings, but really, we'd use it for ourselves. "The Great American Novel by Alyssa Nedbal"? I could work with that. So keep writing and keep this mug handy. You thought you wouldn't survive to see your book hit the classics shelf, but now you don't have to wait and hope. You can simply order.

Get Up, Get Motivated, and Write

It's no secret that I am in love with Asheville, North Carolina. If you've ever checked out my Pinterest page, you know that I have an extensive board dedicated entirely to Asheville. I first visited Asheville in March of 2014, when I wrote you this post about my Southeastern vacation. And then there was this post a little over a month ago referring to my move to North Carolina.

What you may not know is that I fell so completely in love with Asheville during my 2014 trip that I (with the help of my mom) convinced my entire family to move to North Carolina with me. My grandparents went first, then finally my parents' house sold and my mom, dad, brother and I moved. However, there was one little kink in my plan: no one else loved Asheville like I did.

So, instead of moving straight to my utopia, I landed an hour and a half away in a suburb of Charlotte. It's great here, don't get me wrong - the weather is blisteringly awesome, and I'm having a lot of fun decorating my new room and taking evening trips to Charlotte - but it isn't Asheville.

When I heard that the HGTV Urban Oasis 2015 was located in Asheville, NC - my Asheville, NC! - I set a countdown widget and waited for the first day I could begin entering. Since that day, I've logged on to the Urban Oasis site everyday and entered to win my perfect dream home in my perfect dream location.

As soon as I turn my computer on - before I begin writing or blogging or searching Pinterest - I go to the site and enter myself into the drawing for the Urban Oasis.

And that routine got me thinking...what if we applied this sort of routine to writing life? If you're truly dedicated to writing, if it's what you long for and desire above everything else is to write, then why not make it the start of your day, every day?

Before you check your email - write a sentence.

Before you heat your tea - write a paragraph.

Before you walk out the door for your commute - write a phrase, a period, a word - anything!

If it's your dream, if it's something you want with all your heart, then why shouldn't you make it happen in any way that you can?

John McPhee once did an interview with The Paris Review where he said,

"put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket's going to have some water in it."

Writing takes dedication and motivation. It takes getting up early and staying up way too late. Sometimes, it takes sneaking a sentence in here and there whenever you can, just so you can move that story farther along.

But the more you do it, the more it repays you. In the end you could have a wonderful piece that's ready for publication. You could have a whole novel or an epic poem. You could be walking away with your own dream house.

The Pacifier Predicament

When I was three years old, my mother finally convinced me that I was too old to be using pacifiers. She did this in a very stealthy way, like many mothers. She told me that poor children in Africa needed pacifiers, and could I donate a few of my pacifiers for the children who cried all day and night because they had none?

I, of course, agreed. I scurried around the house, digging my pacifiers from their hiding spots. I flung them into the cardboard box my mom set out in the living room. I found every single pacifier, and then I took the final pacifier out of my own mouth and added it to the box. My mom labeled the box for a phony African children's organization and we taped it shut.

Then, my mom and I walked the box of pacifiers down to the mailbox at the end of the driveway and slotted it in. She let me put the little flag up and I said goodbye with no reservations to every pacifier I had.

Little did I know, my mother snuck down to the mailbox during naptime and removed the box because, of course, the African children's pacifier organization didn't really exist.

That day my mom successfully did two things. 1. She became the spring board off which I would further my activism later in life, and 2. She allowed me to give up the things I no longer needed when I was ready.

This is something you need to remember when you write, too.

I bring up this little anecdote because it's something I'm struggling to remember at this very moment. I'm currently working on a story written in separate installments. My brain thinks that once I'm done with one part, I should go back and reread it and revise where necessary. But my heart tells me to keep writing. If I don't keep up the pace and flow of the next story, they won't seem cohesive.

What I keep telling myself to remember is that even if a scene doesn't feel complete or feels a little off for some reason I can't fathom right now, I don't need to worry about it. I just need to keep writing. When I finish the whole story - every single part - then I can go back and reread to see what's wrong.

Right now, I'm not ready to give anything up in my writing process. And it would be traumatic for me to be forced to.

This same advice works if you're already in the revising stage, too. Let's say you submit the next chapter of your novel to your trusty beta readers. They come back with HUGE problems in the plotting and characterization. However, you just can't seem to bring yourself to kill your darlings just yet.

It's okay. Go have a cup of coffee. Work on some poetry or the next chapter. Wait until you have enough distance from the criticism to truly take it in.

Because if my mom had come to a two year old Alyssa and asked her to give up her pacifiers, even if it was for a good cause, I would have screamed and refused. If she persisted, I probably would have developed some life-long thumb sucking habit. But instead, I got the space I needed to nurture the idea of giving up my beloved pacifiers. I was only approached with the idea of change when I was ready.

Don't feel bad if you leave a scene unfinished to continue the rate at which you're writing. Don't feel bad if you thank your critiquers for their comments, but don't look at them or use them for months. Everyone has a different time frame with change. Find yours and you'll be sending those pacifiers off in no time - no looking back.

Formatting Email Submissions: A Worksheet

Many literary magazines and even some agents are switching to sites like Submittable to handle their submissions. Those sites are great because it allows the author to fill in a form for general information, and then upload their story in a file format (usually .doc or .docx) so that the agent or editor can read it.

It's great for the author, too, because all their formatting stays firmly in place - all italics show up as italics, bolding is visible, and the formatting indentation of paragraphs stays secure.

Best of all, the receiving party doesn't have to worry about unintentionally opening a virus onto their computer because Submittable checks for bad omens like that.

However, a lot of magazines and agents still require that you submit to them through email with your submission in the body of the email. (Also so they don't download any nasty viruses by opening bad files.) This means that you can't attach a handy file. It means you must copy and paste your story (yes, even if it's 14,000 words) into the message box of the email.

Over the years, I've submitted hundreds of stories, poems, and article pitches this way. But even when you've done it a hundred times, it can still be boggling to know exactly how to format a submission for email. So, this week, I'm offering up a worksheet of my tried and true email formatting tips.

Step One: Highlight the text of your submission and right click COPY.

Step Two: Go to your email body and place the cursor where you want the submission to start (this is usually after a query letter or note of introduction to the agent/publisher/editor). Right click and make sure to select PASTE AS PLAIN TEXT.

[Note: Plain Text will remove ALL your formatting. This means no paragraph breaks, no indents, and no italicizing or bolding. Your submission will look like one giant text block. This is normal. Don't Panic. Trust me.]

Step Three: Go through your submission line-by-line. The spacing of text lines should be single spaced, between paragraphs double spaced, and no indentations anywhere in the submission. Basically, you want to format it just like this blog entry is showing up on your screen. See the single space between the line above and this line because they belong to the same paragraph?

And now, when I start a new paragraph, I add an extra space between them. Also notice that I did not indent the new paragraph because most email servers don't recognize indentation and will put funky alien symbols there in front of your words. Not appealing.

Step Four: Once the formatting is complete, go back to find all your stylized text like italics and bolding. They will appear just like normal words in the Plain Text version. You must place _underscores_ around the words like I just did. This translates to the reader that that particular portion of text needs stylization, whether it be italics or bold. So rather than saying that Sadie is such a bore. You must say that Sadie is _such_ a bore.

Make sense?

When all four steps are complete, you can go ahead and hit send with the knowledge that your email will show up in an appealing and legible fashion in any email, regardless of the server service.

It can be a bit time consuming and tedious, but when it's already so difficult to get published, isn't it better to take the half hour to format it correctly, then to have your wonderful story turned down because the editor got fatigued reading: ^#$@I%m in big trouble<%#$&* I said. ?