A New Way of Looking at Things in the New Year

Ornament, Christmas tree

Christmas Tree, ornaments

(photos by Nita Lou Bryant)

Ever since starting a small business (now defunct) and learning to take photos of jewelry for online listings, it feels natural to me to look at things in close-up. So natural, in fact, I often find it difficult to step back and take a longer view. But it's important in life to look at things both ways. Otherwise, you get so caught up in the details you fail to discern the bigger picture.

Which is why my family and I will start the new year by moving house.

The house we live in was built in 1939 for a just-married couple, who then went on to raise four children here. It changed owners several times before we bought it, and was for a time occupied by renters. My husband and daughter and I moved in a dozen years ago, but it's been an empty nest now for over a year.

The kindest way to put it is that the house is showing its age.

It needs work: maintenance, repairs, and fix-up. Work that my husband and I--so focused on the myriad details of everyday life--lack the time and energy to even think about, much less do. Somehow, though, we recently managed to step back and take a good, hard look at our house from a distance. When we did, it became clear that someone needs to do this work.

So we decided to get out of the way and let them get to it by temporarily moving ourselves into a rental house. That's step one.

Step two is to put this old house on the market once the maintenance, repairs, and fix-up work are done. While we love this neighborhood and are good friends with our neighbors, we've decided that we'd like to live in a house that's brand new for a change.

Because the truth is, we're showing our age, too.

We don't want to have to keep up with the maintenance an older house will require over the next couple of decades. We figure that if we buy a new home now, it might be fifteen years or so before it would need much work. And who knows--by then, we may be ready to make a different kind of move altogether. Such as to a retirement community with an assisted living option. (Not, we hope, straight into a nursing home!) But the two of us staying in this older home and aging? That strikes us as being  shortsighted.

We've resolved to start the new year off by taking the long view.

How will 2010 be different for you?

Holiday Greeting Cards and Turning Back the Hands of Time

photo by Nita Lou Bryant

"Only connect!"

                          --E.M. Forster

At our house we usually spend time over Thanksgiving weekend crafting a newsletter to duplicate and enclose with the holiday greeting cards we send out to family and friends. My husband, daughter, and I each write a few paragraphs summarizing the most significant events in our lives over the past eleven months. Then, before the envelopes are sealed, I slip in a recent photograph of my daughter so everyone can marvel at how she has grown.


Things are going to be different this year.


Oh, we'll still send out holiday greeting cards. In fact, incorporated in the clever design of this year's card will be a photograph of each one of us on the surface of a holiday ornament. There's even an ornament that features the dog.


But the newsletter?


Nah. We're not doing that.


It's not that we have nothing to tell, because 2009 was a really busy, productive year for all of us. We  traveled, wrote and published, attended conferences, made films, gave speeches, appeared on panels, hosted parties, knitted dishcloths, blogged, assembled homemade smudge pots and jars of aromatherapy bath salts, and even had our photos appear in the newspaper's society page! But thanks to the internet, our professional achievements and successes as faculty member, film student, and writer are pretty much all a matter of public record. So what's the point of trumpeting our accomplishments via holiday newsletter? Google and ye shall find.


Besides, it seems increasingly presumptuous to assume that everyone on our holiday greeting card list wants to know the exact same things about us when each friendship or family connection exists its own unique context. This year it occurs to us that a holiday newsletter is to a handwritten message on a greeting card as a Facebook status update is to a phone call. Somehow what's meant to be personal isn't so personal anymore.


So we've decided to turn back the hands of time.


This holiday season we plan to write at least a brief, personalized message on every card that we send out. Words that we hope will mean something to the specific individual to whom they are addressed. For example, take my  friend Jane C. in Wisconsin, whom I've not seen for many years now. Suppose that instead of providing her with a complete update on my travels or a tally of my essays that managed to see print this year, I told her that


every time I make a pie I follow the recipe for pie crust that she gave me decades ago. That I think of her while I'm cutting the shortening into the flour and tossing in a pinch of salt. That while rolling out the dough I remember how we first met (working together at the Texas Tech library), where we liked to go for lunch (that one Mexican restaurant in Lubbock), and how much we always enjoyed laughing together and talking about the books we'd read.


I think that's something that Jane C. in Wisconsin would truly like to know. My brother-in-law Jim E. in Kansas? Not so much.


If you stop to think about it, there's a personal reason why every single friend or family member remains on your holiday greeting card list throughout the decades. Why it's important to you to touch base with that person at least once a year. Tap into that unique context and you may rediscover the true meaning of sending out holiday greeting cards, which is nothing if not personal.


After all, isn't the whole point only to connect?

Writers Waltzing with Fate: Three Questions for Aspiring Writers

photo by Nita Lou Bryant



I think all that authors can do is to write the best book they can,

find a great advocate for their work,

and do whatever publicity they're able to do when the book comes out.

Everything else is up to fate.

--Nathan Bransford, November 12, 2009

I read literary agent Nathan Bransford's blog religiously. I say that because I not only read it frequently, I read it in search of guidance and inspiration. I read it because I am the kind of writer who aspires to publish her novel the traditional way: via contract with an established print publishing house.

Hence the need for frequent guidance and inspiration.

Writers, Nathan Bransford delivers.

What his blog delivered unto me this morning can be likened to a waltz lesson for writers, all of whom are daily dancing with fate. His current blog post was about "moving the needle" in the world of publishing and, as with all his posts, it garnered a great many comments. Though I always read Bransford's posts I do not always wade through his other readers' comments.

This time I did.

And it was in Bransford's response to a comment that I discovered the waltz lesson for writers. It's as simple as 1-2-3. And if you know anything about waltzes, you know that that the emphasis falls on step one:

write the best book you can.

But simple doesn't necessarily mean easy. Learning to dance not only requires mastering the steps but putting in hours and hours of practice. Daily practice, if possible, with each session building on the ones that went before.

If, like me, you aspire to be published then my first question for you is, how often do you practice writing?

Step two:

find a great advocate for your work.

This is where many writers falter. If a writer's goal is to publish via contract with an established print publishing house, she needs a literary agent for her dance partner. Literary agents are everywhere the music is, yet it is terribly difficult to find one who will say yes to a writer's invitation to dance. Because before an agent agrees to take a turn around the dance floor with you, he must fall madly in love with your story.

Love at first sight isn't something one can orchestrate. It just...happens. But: it only happens if the two people who are magically right for each other actually meet.

Which means that if the first agent turns you down, you summon up the courage to ask another agent to dance. And another and another and another and another and another and another until you finally find one who says yes. Yes, I will dance with you and be an advocate for your work because I have fallen in love with your story.

So my second question for you is, how many agents have you asked to dance?


By which I mean that you've researched the types of books an agent represents and then crafted a query letter designed to spark that particular agent's interest. You don't want to be one of those desperate writers standing on the edge of a jam-packed dance floor shouting, "Doesn't anybody wanna dance with me?"
  

Because here's the other thing: even if an agent does accept your invitation you're still not ready to get out on that dance floor.


You must first determine whether this agent will be a great advocate for your work. If not, then the search for a partner starts all over again.

Dancing isn't for the faint of heart.

 Step three:

do whatever publicity you can when the book comes out.

The way I see it, this means that you, too, must be madly in love with your story. Surely you've all been around someone who's in love. You will have noticed that his beloved is All. He. Ever. Talks. About. Not only does he want everyone else on earth to know how wonderful his beloved is, and how proud he is of her, he wants them to fall in love with her too.

Which leads me to question number three.

Are you sufficiently in love with your work to trumpet it to the whole world?

Because, writers, that kind of mad love gets publicity.

And after that?

After that it is exactly as Bransford tells us:

Everything else is up to fate.

All together now, a-one and a-two...