Let's start with a year review!
First, we have reached two years of this pandemic, and while the first half of the year was isolation that lasted far too long and stretched my mental health paper thin, the second half brought vaccination. I have both the vaccine and the booster, and am thankful myself and my older father have not been infected to date.
Second, this year I had some first short stories released, which was exciting. The first 50 pages of my novel have seen some significant improvement.
During the holidays, I had a really great fun day before Christmas where I had a lot of really positive responses and input. It really put me in the holiday spirit. I was invited to submit to a closed submission window for a major literary magazine, which makes me excited and nervous. The fall short story has gone out for some more eyes to see what changes might help make it polished to submit.
I started looking at graduate school applications, and they continue to present a very difficult dilemma to me. Two of the pre-Christmas input was to set up a one on one virtual meeting with one admissions officer. I have already had some meetings with a local program. The other was a group doing admissions coaching. The material on their website made me decide to approach the personal "motivation" statement like a memoir creative writing project, with the same emphasis on telling a story with the included prompts, and an emotionally engaging hook at the start.
However, the advise they gave me personally was to word map the qualities the program said it was looking for, but when I made that list, I didn't see qualities that included my personality. I guess that does help me prepare for the admissions meeting with some of the same questions I asked the other program in the fall.
The lack of confidence that this coaching group instilled in me to understand my story instead of trying to steer me toward using words that would make the story sound like every other story the admissions office receives, reminds me of the problems I have finding quality editing professionals, so I want to segue into that topic. It relates to another event that happened over Christmas.
Another event that happened before Christmas was getting a report from the editor who was supposed to be workshopping the omniscient pov in a very concrete way to assign practices for me to apply to my text to push my writing and continue throughout the novel. While it was refreshing that she saw the potential in what she saw I was trying to do, compared to the omniscient pov haters, the report itself met minimum professional standards. She made five categories as her way of organising the types of scenes she thought I could approach, and three of those categories were in the last half of the report. The problem is that the scenes she was trying to use to describe the categories and explain her advice on the pov were completely jumbled with numerous gross errors. Not like you read it and think "ok she used the wrong character name, but I know which character she was talking about." She completely recombined events and characters in ways that made the scene unrecognisable, at least in being able to comprehend at all that category of scene she was trying to use as an example.
I spent half a year last year interviewing really unprofessional editors. Now I look back on the number of times they told me I started the story in the wrong place, and balked when I told them they were wrong, attacking me emotionally and having meltdowns. I haven't changed where I started the story, and now no one even asks that question anymore.
The feedback she had about the opening scene, however, was bad in other ways, and kind of represented my worst nightmare in encountering publishing professionals, agents, publishers or editors, on my path to publication. The reason her opinions were expressed in such a bad way is because it was clear we were only developing pov, not discussing plot or character arcs. She did not demonstrate any respect to the intentionality of the opening scene, and used a reference text from a traditional genre scene that had an entirely different intention. It was like she couldn't imagine how my scene needed to be conveyed. She just wanted me to do it like this older author from way back in the day. (She also happened to refer to the scene as doing things it didn't actually do as an example I was supposed to follow)
This brings me back to the lack of professionalism among editing and publishing professionals. When I sent her feedback on the poor quality of her report, I was dismissed as "not agreeing with her opinion," rather than being heard that the actual report could not be understood well enough - because of her gross errors referring to my text - to have an opinion whether I agreed or disagreed.
Another topic of events that happened over Christmas weekend draw a stark contrast in communication styles in the rest of my life and with people in the publishing journey sector. I mentioned a dilemma I have had in my personal life this fall with two really high quality options of men who are potentially interested in pursuing something with me. Since I was having such an amazing week last week, and in this holiday cheer, I thought what would top it off was if the one who is my first choice would make a move finally. This is an ongoing situation for a long time, and while he and I have never really been romantically involved, I am close with his family, almost to the point where I just have to refer to some of these relationships like my inlaws.
So the events over the weekend involved, them, and three other mutual people who I am including to clear up the events that I actually experience versus rumours and gossip. One of the mutual friends has ties with my brother's social circle as well as the other person of interest, so my consideration has been to be honest about this dilemma. However, to the point where the first person of interest can't handle the pressure. Hence, rather than him making a move over Christmas weekend, he was instead having massive nuclear meltdowns and creating a lot of drama. I thought "these poor people who are hearing about this probably did not want to spend their Christmas weekends hearing about more drama and meltdowns for him."
However, the type of communication from me required by these high performing men, including his father, is super blunt and direct and to the point. Beating around the bush, trying to spare anyone's feelings, or not expressing frustration, has led into all kinds of complications socially for me. Professionally, I am frequently dealing with the same types of people. Plus, generally, I live in Germany, and that is the communication culture.
The contrast between how much direct communication these people can take versus editors who cannot handle a red line edit of their report that shreds it and "leaves it in the backyard burning" (that was how an intern I had once described what I did to his resume to help him understand what standard it needed to meet to be competitive), is just totally baffling to me.
Where have all the professionals in editing gone? That's definitely a question I'm asking myself. The impact on me is that I have yet again encountered someone with bad editing opinions who come into my text and start asking questions about things other than the topic being discussed. She even told me I "should" change the title of the ruler, and then proceeded to use the incorrect, ignorant, erroneous word throughout her report. This is exactly the kind of lack of respect and professionalism I dread encountering with agents or publishers. It just makes me dread any future interactions - I become so burned out dealing with the lack of emotional stability and professionalism of these interactions it makes me expect that every single member of this group and profession are going to ultimately behave in an incredulous way that threatens ruining the book.
Ultimately what it does is make editing and revisions on my book impossible because of the lack of support available or findable to do the actual work I need to do to get my book the right level. That is infuriating to me. Anyone else?
With the personal situation, the father in law tried to help offer me suggestions, then realized when he saw the level of blunt honestly I employed in handling it was far more successful, he felt inadequate in being able to help me. At least he admitted it. At least in that scenario, the ability to be honest is refreshing. He felt I was far more competent at wrangling in a ridiculous situation than he was. Then I proceeded to get love bombs from the family, which still don't help cover for the fact that their son is not making a move, today just like it never has.
What I really need are some things like my personal life, finding the correct support to make progress with my book, and the very messy confusion about graduate programs, to become simpler. That would be my wish for the new year.
Comments