Sunday Musings Or Rejection, Pouting, Flooding,Treasuries and Scrabble,

2008-06-15T23:37:00.006-05:00

Well, I had a bit of a disappointing Friday. I was having a bad day to begin with and went out to do my grocery shopping and came home to an envelope in my mailbox. From the publisher. Saying they didn't want my book. I didn't exactly cry, but I wasn't dealing with it very well. I called my mom, who just told me to submit it to another publisher. She's a writer and has been rejected numerous times as has every other published writer out there. Then I called my hubby who has been called up for flood duty and I haven't seen him in five days anyway. He said to submit it to another publisher. Can't a girl get ANY sympathy? I go looking for someone to tell me the editor was blind and I wrote an excellent book (my test readers have all said they couldn't put it down, anyway), and what do I get? Submit it to another publisher. Instead I pouted. For about five hours. Then I got online and looked up a bunch of publishers and read the submission guidelines. I also read an amazing article on handling rejection. The author said when she receives a rejection letter, she sticks it in a file and then closes the file drawer. Then she opens the folder on her computer that houses her publishing info and then her rejection spreadsheet where she adds the publisher that rejected the piece. Once that's done, she opens her submissions spreadsheet and adds the piece to the next publisher in line, and it goes immediately from being a rejected piece to being a submitted piece once again. That gave me hope, and I decided I'm going to take the experience I gained from actually writing a full novel and go through and rewrite the whole thing and submit it again to another publisher. I have my first rejection out of the way, so the rest will be easier, right?

Now, while we are talking about my book, if you would like to be a test reader for me (I'd really like to have some who don't know me and won't feel like they can't give me open criticism) and would give an HONEST critique, feel free to email me at lissasnyder@mchsi.com, and I will send you a copy of my book once I've rewritten it. I'm looking for five test readers and will choose on a first come, first read basis. By the way, it's romantic intrigue, and I do not have sex scenes in my books.

I should have written this earlier tonight. I'm too tired and just not nearly as mouthy as I usually am. But I wanted to stop putting off posting again and actually do it. My writing style, which did kind of come out in my first post, is what I call dark sarcasm, and it ain't happenin' tonight. My second book is really showing this style, and I would like to rewrite the first one more in that style too. It took a little longer to find my voice than I hoped.

Father's Day was kind of a bust. I got to spend the afternoon with my dad. Well, some of it. We always go to my parents' for dinner after church on Sundays, and my mom fixed BBQ ribs for him, one of his favorites. He's a truck driver and mainly spots trailers (moves empties up to the dock to be loaded and fulls away from the dock to be picked up and delivered) for a factory down on the river. He got a call in the middle of dinner. The plant was evacuating and they need him to move trailers. So he was pouting about having to miss the rest of his Father's Day, and I can't blame him. And as I said, my husband is on flood duty. He was in a town about an hour and a half from here, and the kids and I were going to go up to see him until he called to say they were moving, and he didn't know where they were going. By the time we got off the phone, he was pouting too.

So the kids, my mom and I went down to the river (the Mississippi) to see how much it's gone up. We have an old bridge here that used to be for cars until they opened the new one about 25 years ago (and yes, it's still the NEW bridge). The old one is still used for trains on the bottom and is an observation deck on the top. They won't let anybody down on the riverfront unless they're sandbagging to protect the water plant, so we were up on the old bridge. We stopped to watch the sandbaggers (with 4 kids, I wasn't about to try to sandbag with them running around, besides, I'm doing my flood duty. I had to give up my husband), and we were getting heckled by sandbaggers who chose to yell at us (not just US but the other 100 or so people who were with us on the bridge too) for not helping them instead of actually doing what they had volunteered to do. Like they thought GUILT was a good motivator. Yeah, just made me ticked, and it was really hard not to smart off.

When we got home, I got on Etsy about an hour before the Treasury opened. I snagged a treasury, my second, and named it Discovering the Undiscovered II. My first was, well, Discovering the Undiscovered. I'm trying to promote undiscovered shops and will be doing that here too. My goal is to get my treasury on the front page, so please check it out. http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=50689

So I did quite a bit of promoting the treasury and decided I really needed to make something new. I'm in love with the Scrabble tile pendants that are out there and bought some tiles to try it out in my own style. I made six tonight. They're drying right now, and I need to drill some holes in them to run the wire through to make the pendant part (what do you call that anyway??), and I'm really hoping I don't screw them up when I do. Maybe I should have drilled the holes first? Yeah, well, hindsight and all that.

It's past midnight, and I really need to go to bed, so I guess I'd better quit. I'll try to write more tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be a little more entertaining. :)

Toodles,
Lissa

My First Blog Post

2008-06-12T10:15:00.005-05:00

Okay, okay, I finally gave in and got myself a blog. Are you happy now? I know that EVERYBODY has one. Everybody but ME. Well, up until today, that is. Now I suppose you want to know more about me. Fine.

My name is Lissa, and I'm married to a soldier. He's full-time in the National Guard and up for a promotion, which means we may be moving. Well, we are moving, it's just a matter of when and where. But that's a whole other post in itself. We have four kids, three girls ages 12, 10, and 8 and a boy age 6. And we have 2 dogs, 3 cats and 2 hamsters. They all drive me insane. All of them. Maybe not all at one time but at various times and pretty much constantly. So I write, and I cut things up and glue them together, and I use my mouse to create things, and I read. This is what keeps me sane, well, as sane as I'll ever be.

My greatest creative love right now is writing fiction. I finished my first novel a couple months ago and submitted it to a publisher. Then I promptly tried to forget about it, so I don't drive myself insane. I haven't heard back from them yet. No news is good news, right? Maybe? Oh, well, who publishes their first novel anyway? I'm working on my second novel, and it's much better. Okay, I was working on it until my Office Suite expired because it came with my new laptop that I'm typing on right now, and we had to order a full version, but we ordered it through the military, so I can only get it by CD through the mail, and now I have to wait for it, because we waited until the trial version actually expired before we ordered the full version. So someday soon I'll get to start writing again. Maybe I'll post bits and pieces here for you to read. Would you like that?

My second greatest creative love right now is collage. There's just something, I don't know, twisted? about cutting up old photos and gluing them together into something else. I love the look of it. And it's just therapeutic to completely destroy something and make something beautiful out of it. I sell these creations on etsy. http://homefrontwebdesign.etsy.com.

And then there's graphics and web design. I've been doing this for close to 10 yrs. now, completely self-taught. I'm taking a college course to get an associates degree in web design, but that's taking awhile. Okay, a long while, as in I'm still working on the first semester over a year later. I've been busy, okay? See paragraph 2. My design site is http://www.homefrontwebdesign.com, homefront for the fact that I stay on the homefront while my hubby goes off to war, well at least he did. In 2005. For a whole year. Yeah, not fun. I lost 40 lb., which was nice, but I gained 30 of it back, not so nice.

I think that's all I'm going to give ya right now. My posts might be about my writing with some bits for you to read from whatever I'm working on at the time, or they might be about my art, or they might be about my graphics, or they might be about my family, or they might just be me babbling incoherently which I have been known to do from time to time. You'll just have to check back and find out.

Toodles,
Lissa

Homefront Design Blog

Sunday Musings Or Rejection, Pouting, Flooding,Treasuries and Scrabble,

My First Blog Post