When All Else Fails, Find the Instructions!

May 14, 2012May 28, 2012 | Melia Alexander

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but, yeah, I’m guilty. I’m one of those people who approaches darn near everything with the expectation that whatever it is will be intuitive. Instructions? Pfft. Why bother?

Case in point: this blog. With many thanks and an equal amount of curses to writer friends Jessa Slade and Terri Patrick, I decided to take the plunge a few weeks ago and actually set up this site.

Of course it would be a piece of cake! Of course it wouldn’t take very long! And, OF COURSE I’d get back to tidying up a manuscript for submission within a couple of hours, full website/blog in place!

At the end of a ten-hour wrestling match, I had something, all right. Not quite sure what it was, but it was something. And the next day I figured out a couple of more things. The day after THAT, a few more things got cleaned up. So it’s progressively, sometimes painfully, morphed into what I’ve got today.

All in all, here’s what I learned about the process:

1. Setting up a blog might be intuitive to some, but it sure as heck wasn’t intuitive to me. I ended up SOMEHOW creating two different sites. Which thoroughly explained why I couldn’t find pictures I’d originally posted, or themes I’d originally chosen. These were the kinds of stuff that MADE ME CRAZY until I discovered that each site I’d inadvertently created had its own media file, theme file, etc. The trick was figuring out which one was supposed to be active and somehow making that the primary site. And it would’ve been nice if I’d figured it out at the beginning and not seven hours in!

2. Yelling at the screen didn’t work. Neither did reasoning with it. The (cough, cough) bars of chocolate with a red wine chaser, on the other hand, were perfect. . .. (Isn’t it fabulous how chocolate makes things better?)

3. Asking for help crossed my mind – two weeks AFTER I got the darned thing up and running. Yeah, it’s amazing what tools exist on YouTube, how many people way smarter than me figured stuff out like, oh, I don’t know. . . setting up blogs. I cringe now at the amount of time I’d spent banging my head against my desk — painful on soooo many levels!

To my credit, sheer determination kept me going. Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest use of my time, but. . . okay, okay, it was almost a total waste in retrospect. Still, it’s another example for me that I need to search for instructions BEFORE investing a day and a half of my life on something. Especially when a few hours would’ve taken care of it.

‘Fess up, now. Who’s done something similar? I promise I won’t tell! 🙂

-Melia

Hangin’ With My Critique Peeps

May 5, 2012July 3, 2014 | Melia Alexander

2012-05-05 — With the ever-so-fabulous YA writer, Meredith Clark!

I spent a couple of hours with my romance-writing critique partners this morning, hashing out our stories while sipping our morning drink-of-choice at a noisy Starbucks. (Note: contrary to popular belief, champagne is NOT my morning drink-of-choice. At least, not every day. And only with orange juice. Most times. But I digress. . ..)

My writer friends know me as an almost-anal-about-it plotter. (Sorry, I need a roadmap and a compass or I’ll have looped the globe several times before “The End.”) At this morning’s meet, my goal was to make sure my story grid made sense, and to vet my current manuscript (first stinky draft completed in four weeks) with these uber-talented writers.

Yeah, okay, so nobody wants her precious baby to be scrutinized and called ugly, deformed, or something that should be put out of its misery. But despite the nerves, I’m glad I let my CP’s take a crack at it. It smelled pretty gross when I brought it in. After our session, it’s been changed and powdered and wrapped up in something way better than the dirty diaper it came in with. 🙂

Thanks to my CP’s, the story is on a much more solid foundation, and the plot is structured in a way that is “optimal.” Now I just need to work on making sure at least one of the core competencies is stellar. (And I bet you all thought I slept through the Larry Brooks two-day workshop, huh?) 😉

Do you ever put yourself in an uncomfortable situation (writing-related or not) because, painful as it is, you know the end result will be way better than before?

Just curious.

-Melia