In 12 years I’ve had published 22 chapbooks and 3 books, with two chapbooks and one more book forthcoming next year.
Hyper-productivity is a coping mechanism for brain noise, and an aid to processing. My biggest challenge in writing is getting that distance to see my work from other eyes. Brain fog made the executive function of sending submissions harder than creating poems.
How I Manage Brain Fog and Anxiety as a Writer
To assist myself I have been in many writing groups and have internalized the advice any given person would give and added that to my toolbox.
Literistic emails, monthly deadlines, and Submittable keeps track of submissions. These help my organization.
Anxiety medication allows my baseline normal to be something other than inner shrieking panic. It also relieves the fog, allowing for clearer thinking.
I train for self-compassion and cut toxic people from my life. I tried tai chi, yoga, and meditation—it all did a little bit but more surface than structural. That requires deep thinking about what I allow and a retraining to deflect the inner critic.
When I am stuck, I set one type of writing aside, and instead edit, do new writing, submit, or carry out normal life: dog walks, volunteering at the library or thrift store, cooking, cleaning. When I go non-verbal, I paint or do landscaping.
Watch Out—Writers at Risk for Frozen Shoulder!
My physical challenges are in flux. I’ve had chronic pain and/or fatigue somewhere since 1997.
Several years ago I got frozen shoulder. I thought it was an over-enthusiastic swat playing around with a badminton racket, but the massage therapist gently mentioned that not using the muscles can cause it.
True at the time—my fingers couldn’t straighten, being always at the keyboard. My back ached from poor posture, and I couldn’t put my arms straight out from my shoulders. I couldn’t reach up for a cup or comb my hair.
Massage did a little. Anti-inflammatories did little to nothing. The pain was wild. A cortisone injection into the joint worked wonders immediately.
The therapy of doing inky-dinky spider up and down the wall each day keeps kinks out of the shoulder, mostly. Doing Pilates an hour a week for three years has returned range of motion and some strength.
Writer Should Care for Themselves as Well as They Do Their Pets
Good sleep, walks, and dietary hygiene can keep me running. I make time for rest, even naps. Eating greens and drinking more water than I want help me function even when I’d rather mindlessly much some chocolate, skip a meal and keep moving.
Ramping up the mind with sugar and/or caffeine while the body is sedentary creates tension and stress. I’ve learned to treat the body as I would a pet, giving it fresh air, food and water means I have more level energies.
Resting became non-negotiable after a concussion. I was largely sleeping for three months. Concussion protocols involved no screen time, no hard concentration, no hard physical exertion. With vertigo, it wasn’t hard to obey but as I started to recover, I wanted to resume my life.
Two years later I can’t look at a screen for more than an hour and a half without dizziness, vertigo and bodily punishment of pain.
It helps to use built-in dictation software, listen to audio books, and close my eyes when I scroll so I don’t see the motion. It helps the body to get up and move around for as long as I had just sat at a screen to give breaks. I compose more in my head.
Tips for Selling More Books
First, you need a work as perfect as it can be made in word, layout, covers, binding, pricing and marketing.
Finding a person who really gets it and will hawk it for you and be an influencer who does shout outs will help. Find a few and even more so. If your work fits the pachinko deflections and the zeitgeist of what the public doesn’t know that its looking for, you hit the jackpot.
For more modest gains in sales, there are a few ways to find audience. You can sell out of your bag at every hair salon and busk on sidewalks. You can go to every open mic and small press fair and hope to at least reciprocity trade or sell to fellow writers.
You can create events in public spaces to introduce “non-readers” to your pitch. Some street markets have a booth. By keeping in contact with fellow writers can keep abreast of “the scene” to see new opportunities for a reading or a new call for submissions.
A publisher can bring its audience to you, or more commonly now, you can bring your audience to a publisher and they are (hopefully) better at distribution than one author working alone.
You can try the digital means with newsletters, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. A face-to-face sale is easier to land, with instant gratification of cash and book, hand to hand. You might be looking for one in 2,000 people to connect by serendipity and being in the right place at the right time.
Advice for a Young Writer: Divest Ego from Your Words
Start by self-publishing. Get some Buddhist non-attachment to divest ego from your words. Get critical feedback at writers groups and learn to give and take criticism.
Another article here gives great advice: 10 Ways to Improve Your Writing Life.
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Pearl Pirie’s 4th poetry collection, Footlights, comes in the fall of 2020 from Radiant Press. Her haiku and tanka chapbook, Not Quite Dawn, will come out with Éditions des petits nuages in spring 2020.
A chapbook of haibun, Water loves its bridges: Letters to the dead has another haibun epistle with Eldon, letters (above/ground, 2019).
Pearl can be found on Twitter, and at her author site where she offers resources and conducts poetry courses.
Call Down the Walls
Available from Fog Hollow Press.