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Cross your fingers but don’t hold your breath

/ Edwina Shaw / Leave a comment
boy turns blue holding breath
don’t hold your breath

One thing I’ve learnt over the last eight years of writing, and submitting what I’ve written to publishers, is not to hold my breath while waiting for a reply.

Publishing houses are extremely busy places and though our manuscripts are our precious, darling children and “‘works of genius” that should be read immediately before we pull out all our hair; the reality is that even requested materials are put into a huge pile and set to one side while the real business of getting already contracted books ready for publication is done. Editors read through the pile mostly in their FREE time, on the bus, on weekends, late at night. Which begs the question – do these poor buggers ever get to read a book they really like?
Meantime, we writers sit at home, checking emails as if we have obssessive compulsive disorder, jumping whenever the phone rings, nerves churning in our bellies, full of hope and doubt, grandiose fantasies of super best selling stardom and thoughts of throwing in the towel.
For me, the best cure for “Waiting to Hear” angst is to get stuck into the next project (which is maybe why I have quite a pile of manuscripts to send out!).
Fave suggests sending several different pieces out at once, so you’re not just focussed on one. W’hatever you do, stay busy.
Be hopeful. Dream big. But know that whichever way the penny eventually falls you’re going to be okay. The world doesn’t crumble into a heap with a rejection. Keep redrafting and searching for the perfect beholder of your work.In this business, everything takes a lot of time. Be patient.
Keep your fingers crossed. Just don’t hold your breath.
Write like furies everyone!
Love
Edwina

Treacle and Tahini Procrastination Cookies

/ Edwina Shaw / 3 Comments

Here’s my remedy for the plague of procrastination.

Procrastination makes you sick. The cupboard maybe cleaner than ever before, the bathroom tiles scrubbed, the garden weeded, but that novel manuscript, poem, essay or short story is still there,  ugly as ever, waiting for you to stop farting around and get back to it.

All those other little jobs that suddenly seem so much more important, distract for a little while but all the time, at the back of your mind, lurks the spectre of the writing you should be doing. The longer you take getting back to it, the harder it is and the sicker the feeling in your stomach.

Here’s my proposed cure. It worked for me!

Edwina’s Treacle and Tahini Procrastination Cookies

INGREDIENTS

120 gms butter

1/2 cup dark brown sugar

2 tablespoons treacle

1 cup self-raising flour

1 cup almond meal

1/2 cup tahini

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

METHOD

Preheat oven to 180 degrees (350 F). Line a tray with baking paper

In a medium bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Mix in egg, then add treacle and tahini till well blended. Add flour,  almond meal, cinnamon and cloves and mix.

Make small balls of dough and place on tray. Bake until golden brown. Cool on a rack.

MOST IMPORTANT STEPS

Make cup of tea or coffee

Turn on the computer

Sit down and open feared file

WRITE AT LEAST 200 WORDS (anything will do)

Now you can eat a cookie!

No more procrastinating. Bake the biscuits, face the fear, and use all that sugary energy to write away the urkiness of avoiding what needs to be done.

Okay, enough procrastinating for me. The manuscript calls.

PS. Just submitted the first forty pages to the Varuna/Penguin scholarship award. Fingers crossed.