Sorayali20 - Writer Of Dreams

How to be Your own Best Friend

1. Treat yourself the way you would treat a person who you loved, highly valued, and cared about.

2. Always love yourself – no matter what!

3. Only say positive, compassionate, understanding and affirming things about, and to, yourself.

4. Hold your own hand in tough and stressful times. Don’t abandon yourself, or let yourself down.

5. Respect yourself, and the efforts that you’re making to be a better person, and to change and to grow.

6. Understand your limitations, be patient with yourself. Accept that it takes time to master anything at all.

7. Be kind to yourself when you feel self-critical, or you want to be judgmental and hard on yourself.

After I get the spark for an idea, I get bored by it. How could I work it out so I can get into it and write something? I never finished anything because it's not interesting anymore.

 Almost every author I know has had this issue.  The minute you sit down to work on a project, ten other, apparently more attractive ideas will bob to the surface.

This isn’t a quintessentially fun solution, but the answer is to build a habit of commitment.  Jot down the shiny new ideas that pop up (or devote a separate time allotment to working on them, if you work best that way), plow ahead, and finish.  If you’re overwhelmed by the length of your current projects, try shorter ones.  You don’t have to like the final result, but you’ll be a stronger writer once you get in the habit of finishing projects.

The thing about us authors is, our stories are always more cinematic in our heads.  As we’re planning them out, we’re immersed in an opulent world that we want to share, and can only do our best to convey one word at a time.  So be patient with yourself, set reasonable goals, and build that habit!

I hope this helps, and happy writing.  <3

You Will Be Rejected

Not: You might be rejected.

Not: You’ll have a few rejections.

Not Even: Well, if you’re only mid-list worthy you’ll have at least twenty rejections.

You want to get published? Fine. You need to accept that every single day of your career will have rejection.

Everything you write will be rejected.

Every book you publish will be hated.

Every character you love will be degraded.

Every hour you put in – the blood and sweat and tears – will be dismissed as “…talentless hack who doesn’t know how to string a sentence together.”

Millions of people will never read your book because they can’t read at all.

Millions of people will never read your book because they don’t speak the same language as you.

Millions of people will never read your book because they hate your genre.

Millions of people will never read your book because they don’t like fe/male authors.

Millions of people will never read your book because they didn’t get into it.

Billions of people will reject your work. They will mock you. They will dismiss you. They will talk trash about you.

You. Will. Be. Rejected.

It doesn’t matter. You aren’t writing for the millions. You are writing for the one.

The one person who tells you your book made them cry because it spoke to them.

The one person who tells you your book changed the way they saw the world.

The one person who tells you your book was the only light in a dark time.

The one person who tells you your book inspired them to be something more.

You are writing for them.

They will wish they could take your characters to prom.

They will read your book after their mother’s funeral.

They will curl up in bed with your book on a cold night after their first real break up.

They will turn to those pages time and again to revisit the places they love.

You’re going to get rejected. And you’re going to take that punch square on the chin and not ever back down because you know who you are writing for. Because you know it takes more than a pretty font to make a book work, you have to be willing to take the rejections. You have to go into this knowing you will fail a million times with a million readers, and that it doesn’t matter because you aren’t writing for them.

Keep your chin up. You are someone’s favorite author even if they don’t know it yet.

Stargate Atlantis thoughts - The Storm vs. Common Ground

I find it so funny that Kolya thinks Elizabeth will give in after seeing Sheppard fed upon in Common Ground.  Kolya definitely has the whole thing backwards.  John is the one who’d give in.  Note in The Storm he’s ready to give Kolya a ship the minute Elizabeth is threatened.

Famous authors, their writings and their rejection letters.

Sylvia Plath: There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.

Rudyard Kipling: I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.

Emily Dickinson: [Your poems] are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.

Ernest Hemingway (on The Torrents of Spring): It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horribly cruel, should we want to publish it.

Dr. Seuss: Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.

The Diary of Anne Frank: The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.

Richard Bach (on Jonathan Livingston Seagull): will never make it as a paperback. (Over 7.25 million copies sold)

H.G. Wells (on The War of the Worlds): An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would “take”…I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book’. And (on The Time Machine): It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.

Edgar Allan Poe: Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works in which a single and connected story occupies the entire volume.

Herman Melville (on Moby Dick): We regret to say that our united opinion is entirely against the book as we do not think it would be at all suitable for the Juvenile Market in [England]. It is very long, rather old-fashioned…

Jack London: [Your book is] forbidding and depressing.

William Faulkner: If the book had a plot and structure, we might suggest shortening and revisions, but it is so diffuse that I don’t think this would be of any use. My chief objection is that you don’t have any story to tell. And two years later: Good God, I can’t publish this!

Stephen King (on Carrie): We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.

Joseph Heller (on Catch–22): I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.

George Orwell (on Animal Farm): It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.

Oscar Wilde (on Lady Windermere’s Fan): My dear sir, I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.

Vladimir Nabokov (on Lolita): … overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit was turned down so many times, Beatrix Potter initially self-published it.

Lust for Life by Irving Stone was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies.

John Grisham’s first novel was rejected 25 times.

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen (Chicken Soup for the Soul) received 134 rejections.

Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) received 121 rejections.

Gertrude Stein spent 22 years submitting before getting a single poem accepted.

Judy Blume, beloved by children everywhere, received rejections for two straight years.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle received 26 rejections.

Frank Herbert’s Dune was rejected 20 times.

Carrie by Stephen King received 30 rejections.

The Diary of Anne Frank received 16 rejections.

Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rolling was rejected 12 times.

Dr. Seuss received 27 rejection letters

When you are writing a story and refer to a character by a physical trait, occupation, age, or any other attribute, rather than that character’s name, you are bringing the reader’s attention to that particular attribute. That can be used quite effectively to help your reader to focus on key details with just a few words. However, if the fact that the character is “the blond,” “the magician,” “the older woman,” etc. is not relevant to that moment in the story, this will only distract the reader from the purpose of the scene. 

If your only reason for referring to a character this way is to avoid using his or her name or a pronoun too much, don’t do it. You’re fixing a problem that actually isn’t one. Just go ahead and use the name or pronoun again. It’ll be good.

THAT is how you deliver a tribute speech.

Is micro fiction the same as one- shots?

It’s really just different story lengths.

Super Novel: 120,000+ words Novel: 80,00-120,000 words Young Adult Novel: 30,00-70,000 words Novella: 15,000-30,000 words Short Story: up to 15,000 words Flash Fiction: up to 1,000 words Micro Fiction: up to 300 words

And that’s just one list I found. There are several others with small variations, one change being they listed flash fiction as being up to 100 words but no more. There’s room to be flexible, and they’re really just guidelines.