Tuesday, January 29, 2013

2013: The Year of Pluckiness by Lisa J. Lickel


Lisa J, Lickel
I don’t have much adversity in my life, at least not compared to others, and my success is in the eye of the beholder. So what can I pass on to you, other writers, about this topic?

Pluckiness!

Plucky means being:
Brave
Courageous
and practicing
Determination in the face of Superior Odds

Adversity also comes in small packages. It’s not losing a loved one to a dreaded illness or accident, or being let go from your job, and being diagnosed with a horrible disease; sometimes it’s succumbing to a bout of depression, or getting into a situation that’s beyond your capability, or having the power go out when you’ve written the most beautiful chapter and the cloud sucks it away to la-la land forever where you hope God enjoys it because He’s the only one who will get to read it now. It’s spilling milk on your keyboard—at work—and forgetting how to spell American because you’ve been reading those British books again. It’s getting one more denial from an agent who can’t put her finger on why she doesn’t want you (your work, but really, we all know it’s us), or watching your sales figure plummet on Amazon.

Brave Writers get out of bed in the morning.
That’s a euphemism for facing the day, dividing the moments up into the chunks necessary to get the most work done, and jumping into it. Brave Writers Write. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what, if you’re lost or stuck or fed up with your current project; we just start writing something else. We blog, we toot someone else’s horn, we read, we write a note to someone we’re following…goodness, we might even pick up a pen and handwrite, using that lost art of cursive, a letter to put in the mailbox. We could do a character sketch of a plucky person.

Courageous Writers learn something new every week, if not every day.
One of my goals this year is to learn to market in at least two new ways. I’m told that if I practice something long enough it becomes a habit. If I work on these marketing ways, it’ll become a habit, and often that’s enough to get me out of a rut that’s failing and onto a path toward success. I will find new publishers, I will meet new people, I will write something that makes someone else drool or cry, I will learn not to mix modifiers, and I will discover the best place to start and end my story.

Determined Writers keep pitching, because they can only say no.
They can’t say yes unless you ask, right? Okay, I have an agent—at least at this moment I do—but that doesn’t mean I roll over and play dead. I go to conferences, I ask my agent for advice about the best person to pitch to and how to do that; I look at newer publishers and point them out to others; I take a chance with working with a friend to co-author a book and see where it gets us; I keep writing new samples of work—a theme, a plot, characters and synopsis—in hopes of successfully pitching the idea to my agent and then to a publisher. Writers are Determined to meet publisher’s and reader’s needs.

Plucky ain’t just a spaghetti western female character looking off in the distance, y’all! Plucky is you and me, and we can get the job done, even if it’s not the same one we started.
About the Author
Meow Mayhem by Lisa J. Lickel
Award-winning author Lisa Lickel started writing professionally in 2004 after finishing the Christian Writers Guild apprentice course. She welcomes several more traditionally published novels this year, starting with Meow Mayhem from Whimsical Publications in January, another cozy mystery set in Illinois and challenges Ivy and True to discover what’s rotten in Apple Grove; the much anticipated re-release of Healing Grace, a story about love and sacrifice and the gifts of the Spirit; and book three of the Buried Treasure cozy mysteries sometime in the fall, The Newspaper Code, where Judy Wingate and her not-BFF, newspaper reporter Olivia Hargrove, solve a murder. She is editor-in-chief of Wisconsin Writers Association’s Creative Wisconsin literary magazine, collects dragons, loves to travel and people watch. Find out more at http://www.LisaLickel.com.