Inside & Outside the Lines

I have big plans for the rest of the year, so my writing days are starting to assume that roller-coaster quality they get when I'm trying to manage a lot of projects in a short amount of time. Before I get completely immersed, I thought I'd put on the brakes for a minute and look back at how I've done so far with 2012's theme of coloring outside the lines.

I joined a penpal initiative, and started out writing letters to twelve complete strangers. I wrote one invitation-to-write-me letter that was sent out at random to six people, and replied to six letters that were randomly sent to me. I didn't try to hide who I am behind a fake name or anything like that; I figured take me warts and all, or not. Three never bothered to answer, five were good for one letter, two managed two letters, one is still writing (sporadically) and one has been a steady correspondent who is becoming a friend. Sustaining a real correspondence through letters -- just like writing anything -- is as much work as it is joy, so I didn't have expectations. That I reached out to strangers was very not like me but I'm glad I did.

I had an art exchange with another artist in a medium I rarely show anyone -- my jewelry making. I've been getting more into metal and steampunk, and all my quilting pals do are beaded pieces now and then (which are great but they're more about the patchwork.) I've also been creating these fusion pieces with quilted, beaded and metalwork elements and I want to explore more of that. It's lovely to know someone who is working in this medium.

On the home front I threw my family in a rental car and took them to another city for a long weekend. I planned nothing in advance but the rental car, the hotel, and a very brief visit to a college. I never do this. We had an amazing time. We're definitely doing it again.

I've done more self-promotion since January than I probably have in years. At times I've asked friends and colleagues for help, something that I never do because I have a real phobia about imposing on people. I'm still wrestling with it but it gets a little easier each time. I'm wrapping up the year with much more effort to promote my work in ways I've never before tried, and so far it's been good.

Where I fell short this year:

I didn't enter the art quilt challenge I talked about in early 2012. I wanted to do it mainly to introduce a new technique I've developed, but at the last minute I chickened out. It was a combination of time constraints plus dread, but mostly it was dread. I'm going to try again when I do a few more test runs and feel a little more certain of my expertise. This is a solid solution to an age old problem all quilters have, and I don't want to screw it up.

I stopped work on my 1K Cards Project, which put me a month and a half behind on it. I've since caught up, but allowing emotional stress squash my creativity is not a way to cope. I know I handle problems best by working through them, not hiding from them, and when I'm feeling blue I need reminders of this.

I've pushed myself this year, but not hard enough. I've avoided some opportunities to step outside the lines because I was either keeping the peace or I felt inadequate. Often I just couldn't get past my need to organize everything perfectly; some things cannot be planned, mapped out or predicted. Fighting your routines and your methods in order to try new things can be exhausting, and half the time I gave into the familiar and stayed behind the lines when I should stepped out.

I think every year is a mixed bag in some fashion, but this one has been a real 50/50 for me in every category. So far 2012 has taught me that you can set goals you think are reasonable, but you discover they're a lot harder than you thought only when you're working toward them. Channeling your energy appropriately plays a big part, too. Things that seemed only a little difficult in the planning stages are much tougher when you're tired, or depressed, or spread too thin.

Are any of you still working on the goals you set for this year? How are things coming along for you? Let us know in comments.

Story Therapy

Once or twice a year your creative muse goes off on a jaunt, leaving you with a blank design wall and a blank mind, wondering where your next idea is going to come from. -- Rayna Gillman

Lately I've been working on preparations for the piece I hope to enter into an art quilt challenge. I have several techniques I want to use, including two I invented myself. I have all the materials I need. I even have little experiment pieces I'm making to test out how to put it together. But the design itself, the most important part of the piece? I couldn't figure it out. Everything I put on paper looked too busy, too complicated, too overdone.

I got to where I stopped sketching because everything I drew sucked. After twenty-odd years of designing and sewing I actually had a horrendous case of quilter's block.

I put aside the project last week, and in hopes of clearing out my head, I decided to do something different. For this I consulted my April/May 2012 issue of Quilting Arts magazine, in which I found Rayna Gillman's article, Stitch Therapy. First thought: Do these editors have me under surveillance?

I dutifully read the article, and I didn't like it. To summarize the technique it described, you're supposed to just sew a bunch of free-cut, random strips of scrap fabric together. No rulers, no templates, no pattern, no specific type of fabric, no color choosing or matching. Just cut and stitch. Like quilting could be organic. The author called it playful sewing.

You guys know me. As a writer I'm ruthlessly pre-planned and organized; as a quilter I'm even worse. Playful sewing? Please. I have my entire stash color-coded. I've cataloged my quilting magazine and book collections. I've even alphabetized my templates (okay, and cross-indexed them by size and shape.) I do not play, baby, I sew. And this is my biggest creative stonewall: I have to have everything perfect and prepared and figured out ahead of time.

Of course I know the universe wants me to color outside the lines, so I decided I probably needed some stitch therapy and went ahead with doing a project based on the article.

It's very tough to break old habits, and I won't say I had a great time putting together this piece. I kept trying to color match my scraps, cut them into uniform-sized strips and then sew them together in straight rows. I had to toss out four blocks before I finally got the hang of the no-technique technique. As I was making them I could see that the blocks were all over the place. The crooked seam lines and insane colors made my right eye twitch. But when I finally put the blocks together and had a complete piece, it surprised me with how fun it looked:



It's fresh, bright, and not like anything I've done before. It's nowhere near as good as the author's examples, and it's not going to win any awards. But it's still rather neat. Much as I hate to admit it, I'm looking forward to quilting and finishing the piece.

While I was doing the stitch therapy, I was also thinking about my challenge piece. I have been obsessing over the composition when it's the techniques that I want to showcase. To show a technique clearly and communicate the idea to as many people as possible, the ideal way to go is with an easy-to-understand example. I realized I'd been over-thinking the design. Rather than doing a hugely sophisticated piece with all the bells and whistles, I needed to step back and keep it simple.

I still don't know what my challenge piece design will be, but I have some new ideas. I also know I need to back off on the designing and think more about communicating. Stitch therapy didn't give me all the answers, but what it did was put some distance between me and my problem, and provide the chance to step outside my lines and think in a different direction. Which is where I know the answers can be found.

Right now you may be suffering from the same problem with your writing. You have all these ideas and yet you can't make them work. Everything is too complicated. One thing I've always recommended to writers who are blocked is to stop working on what's not working and do something different. It doesn't have to be a novel; write a short story. Set it in a genre you've never tried before now; if the story you're blocked on is a romance try writing a SF story, or an urban fantasy, or a YA. If you hate vampire stories, write a vampire story. The idea of story therapy is to step outside yourself and play for a short period of time. What you produce you may never be able to sell, but as with my stitch therapy project, it may get your head in the right place to go back and solve the problems with the work you do want to sell.

Winners & Outside the Lines

The winners of the 2 How-tos giveaway are:

Robin Bayne, who wins Laura Oliver's The Story Within, and who likes Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain.

Samantha, who wins Bonnie Neubauer's Take Ten for Writers, and whose favorite writing how-to is Goal, Motivation, and Conflict by Debra Dixon.

Ladies, when you have a chance please send your full name and ship-to information to LynnViehl@aol.com, and I'll get these prizes out to you. My thanks to everyone for joining in.

The first quarter of 2012 is coming to a close today, and I've been looking back to see how well I've done with my theme of coloring outside the lines this year. I think I've gotten off to a good start; I did a lot of new-for-me things as well as things I love with the release of Nightborn, and the results were positive and fun. On the diet front I've successfully given up sugar altogether and (combined with the fallout from the jaw problem) have lost 15 pounds since January. My 1000 cards project stands at 277 finished to date, so I've been keeping up there.

As for the immediate future, I signed up for an online art class that starts in mid-April. I wanted to do this for several reasons: 1) it was inexpensive, 2) the instructor is teaching techniques in a medium I love, 3) I've never taken an online class, and 4) this is really coloring outside the lines for me.

The last time I was an art student I was regularly sent to detention (not by the art teacher, who actually liked me, but by every other teacher I had.) I have since learned to shut my mouth -- well, most of the time -- but I've never gotten over my aversion to teachers and classrooms. It's a stupid attitude for someone who loves to learn, and it's time I moved past it, which is another reason why I'm dipping my toe back into the educational waters.

If this wasn't enough stress, I'm also entering a piece in an upcoming art quilt challenge. I didn't pick an easy one because of course that would be the smart thing to do. If it were a traditional quilting challenge I would feel confident; I've been making patchwork quilts for twenty years and I'm pretty good at it. But I've only recently gotten into art quilts, and to date I've made only about a dozen. Half of those were failures ranging from pitiful to spectacular.

Thing is, I've come up with a simple technique to solve a major headache with traditional and non-traditional quilting, and I want to share it with other quilters. There's no better way to do that than by using it in a piece and entering a challenge.

I'm cautiously excited about taking the online art class. I started assembling my supply list yesterday and I didn't cave into the urge to cancel my enrollment. Also, I know if I can handle a virtual class without messing up or being kicked out of it, then the next step would be to try taking a real-world course. Maybe a beginner's class in photography, since I really know nothing about it other than what I've taught myself with a point-and-shoot. So while I'm suffering through the inevitable pre-class nerves, I have a more distant goal in mind to keep me moving along.

The art quilt challenge is a bit worse. I'm up against the best art quilters out there who have been doing this daily for years, so the odds are extremely good that I'm not even going to be noticed. I think about that, and all my past failures, every time I sit down to work on my piece. While it seems kind of pointless to try, I really believe in this technique of mine, and the results are pretty cool. If I don't place in this challenge, the next thing I could try is a more traditional one, where I would have more of a shot at getting some attention.

When a writing sub op catches your eye, or you consider preparing a novel proposal for a publisher, you'll think of a million reasons not to do it. There are so many writers out there, and at least half are better at it than you. The odds are most definitely against you. You've probably racked up enough rejections to feel beaten before you even start counting words or composing that cover letter. Sanity dictates that you stick to what you know and don't cross any lines into unknown territory. I understand. Been there. Done that. Ten years in a row.

What always kept me going back to the submission list -- and still keeps me at the keyboard every day -- is the thought of all the great writers who never were. How many wonderful stories have we lost to fear and self-doubt? I believe for every Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling on the market there are a dozen just like them who will never be known or their work read. The manuscripts for their amazing novels will sit on a hard drive or gather dust on a shelf until they're deleted or tossed out. This because they didn't think they were any good, and/or they were too afraid to try. Or they tried a few times, and failed, and gave up.

On a more personal level, I also think about a writer of mine who spent years getting ready to write his first novel. We talked about it a lot, and he had the kind of talent and ideas it takes to get into print. I knew he would make it. I just knew. He saved every penny, thought it through, organized, took off from work and prepared to go the distance. He was well aware of his competition and the odds against him, but he was ready. He was so happy, so excited . . . and then he died in an accident, and his novel died with him. So when I think about giving up on writing (or anything) I can almost hear him in the back of my head saying, "You're kidding me, right?"

What are you doing to color outside your lines? What would you like to do? What's keeping you from doing it? Let us know in comments.

Ready-Made Promo

Next month I'll be invading making guest appearances on some other blogs in NetPubLand, and for all my visits I'm planning a giveaway as well. I think signed books are always best, but in keeping with my color outside the lines directive for this year I'd also like to do something special with them.

I went to BAM to get some inspiration, and wandered over to the bookmark rack to see if they had any new products. I found four that jogged my imagination in different ways: The Book Holder by That Company Called If; a nifty little man-shaped plastic clip that holds your book open while you read it ($3.99); a foiled and embossed double-sided inspirational bookmark by Vibrant Expressions ($2.99); a Plant Me I'll Grow bookmark by Lil Bloomer that is embedded with annual and perennial wildflower seeds ($2.99); and a neat little box of twelve Herman Yu Flora bookmarks by teNeues ($6.95).

Using a ready-made product as a promo widget isn't anything new; writers have been doing it forever. The weirder the item, the more attention it gets -- I remember one RWA National I went to where one author had parked a basket of real chili peppers in the goody room. I'm not really into the gimmicky promo stuff, so I prefer to build around a product, using something ready-made as a theme for the rest of the promo. Back in December, the snowflake tote I picked up at B&N became the central theme of my holiday giveaway, from the Let it Snow title to most of the bag's contents.

teNeues' box of bookmarks caught my eye because there were a dozen (one for every month of the year), the bookmarks individually were cheap (about fifty-eight cents each) and there's a place for notes on the back of each one (readers who like to keep track of what they read could jot down titles there), there are two of each design (perfect for sharing with a reader friend) and the flower theme is attractive but general enough that I can pair a lot of things with it. For this giveaway I could go with flower seeds and gardening stuff for a floral theme, an all-year theme with calendars and other time management helpers, or a share-with-a-friend theme by offering two of everything.

Some ready-made items can also be a jumping-off point for your promo; you add some items to help with the use of your theme product (such as a gardening guide, a pretty flower pot and a pair of weeding gloves for the bookmark with the seeds embedded in it.)

As a reader I'm most attracted to unusual promo that has a practical purpose. I like things I can actually use, especially when I went to conferences and had a limited amount of space in my suitcases. I love tote bags and I use a million of them, but I've never found one used for promo that was particularly sturdy or had pockets for small items. I passed on most of the custom promo, as even the most attractive cover art on an item becomes quickly dated, and unattractive cover art is just sad.

One final note: the more gimmicky something is, the more leery I become, especially when an item poses more of a hazard than a benefit. The basket of chili peppers I mentioned definitely grabbed my attention, but as someone who frequently cooks with them I know they shouldn't be handled without protective gloves on. So that promo actually backfired; I didn't touch the peppers or take any of the actual book-related stuff parked with them.