Keeping a sweet spirit from the sidelines

Some of you went to ACFW and had successful agent and editor appointments, requests for material, and positive feedback on your work.

Others of you attended, but felt that your meetings did not go well. Perhaps you bungled your pitch; maybe the agent wasn’t interested in what you had to offer, or the editor felt your genre was already over-represented at their house. Whatever the case, you came away deflated and feeling the sting of failure.

Still others weren’t able to attend at all. You watched from the sidelines as your friends went and returned, glowing with their successes and accomplishments. Your role has been a cheerleader, and although you’re glad to celebrate with your friends, a deep-down part of you wonders when it will be your turn.

freedigitalphotos.net, image by photostock

For those who fall into the last two categories, this post is for you. How do you keep a sweet spirit when it seems as if everyone is being promoted around you and you’ve been left far behind?

Here are some ideas.

1. Pray a blessing over those who are doing well.

Bless them? Aren’t they the last people in need of your prayers?! They’re already being blessed!

Perhaps, but this exercise has more to do with the state of your spirit than the state of the person you’re praying for.

Praying a blessing over someone else in their time of success is the best way to do spiritual warfare against jealousy. (click to tweet.) The enemy wants you to feel jealous; to compare yourself and feel like you come up short. When you turn this on its head and pray for God to heap blessing on the person you envy, Satan’s attack on your heart loses its power.

So pray, even if – especially if – you don’t feel like it. Pray for those God has blessed, for even more abundance, for favour, for new and better opportunities, for success overflowing.

The more you exercise this sort of spiritual warfare against resistance, the more God will transform your heart, bringing it into line with the words you’re praying, until you forget about yourself and genuinely desire the success of others.

2. Focus on the kingdom picture, not the glory of self.

We say our motivation in writing is to bring glory to God, but nothing tests this assertion like moments when there is no glory for self to be found. (click to tweet.)

Is your heart for God’s kingdom to grow? Meditate on this. Spend time in the word, reminding yourself daily of the bigger picture at stake. All our accomplishments will one day pass away, but God’s kingdom will last forever.

When our heart is in tune with God’s heart, our focus naturally shifts away from ourselves and toward kingdom values. Competition is replaced with teamwork. We’re all working for a common goal, so the success of another is your success, too.

Praise God for any way in which his word goes forth, whether it’s carried by you or someone else. The important thing is God glorified.

freedigitalphotos.net, image by Sura Nualpradid

3. Rest in God’s good plan for your life

Striving ties us up in knots and brings dissatisfaction.

It says, “I don’t trust God to work this out, so I must make it happen on my own.”

And when you can’t make it happen, or things don’t go the way you hoped, you feel depressed and lose your confidence.

Hebrews 10:35 says: “So do not throw away this confident trust in the Lord. Remember the great reward it brings you!” (NLT)

This type of confidence doesn’t depend on attending a writer’s conference or having agents and editors request your work.

It’s a confidence rooted in your deep soul-knowledge that God loves you, that he wants his best for you, that he has ordered your steps from before you were born and is daily working out his purposes in your life.

Don’t throw that away to lean on your own striving.

Confident trust brings peace and rest and joy in the journey, no matter what the outward circumstances look like.

Be blessed, take heart and take joy! God has you in the palm of his hand.

 Did ACFW leave you elated or deflated? What is God speaking to you through this experience?

Tweetables:

How to keep a sweet spirit from the sidelines of the writing life: Click to Tweet

Celebrate the success of others without jealousy or comparison - here's how: Click to Tweet

Karen Schravemade lives in Australia. When she's not chasing after her three preschool-age kids, she spends her spare minutes daydreaming about the intricate lives of characters who don't actually exist. Find her on her website and Twitter.

An ACFW Recap In Pictures...and a Bit of Wisdom

 You know that feeling right?

That feeling like you're forgetting something? The proposal? The cell phone charger?

Your boarding pass. That was pretty much me the entire time I was traveling. Thankfully this niggling feeling of forgetfulness was never fulfilled. ;-)

Aside from the fact that there was no bookstore and I felt lost without the normal hangout place to go, ACFW Indy, proved to be the year that God was waiting for me to show up. The one year I actually did not glean mega-information from the classes, was the one year that God was beckoning to meet Him in the prayer room. In the halls. In the worship sessions. 

Can one really allow themselves to spend so much money to further their relationship with God instead of the level of their craft?

Yes. For me, it was definitely worth it. I couldn't do it anywhere else on my own and God knew that. God knew I needed to be surrounded by friends that knew my heart's desire only better than I know it myself.

Yes, Brandilyn Collin's sentence rhythm class was am-a-zing.

The pitches (surprisingly) went really well and I'll be heading into the rounds of submitting soon.

I got to squeeze so many friends who have been amazing to me online and reconnect to those friends that only grow more precious as the years go by.

In the next couple weeks I will be gleaning from my notes to share with you here, but for today I just wanted to share something God taught me while at ACFW this year:


We often don't know why He has brought us to the place He has. We often can't fathom why our grounds are allowed to be shaken and our faith in what we are sure we should be doing (ie: writing a novel) is tested. 

But God is GOOD through it all. 

GOD IS GOOD. 

From the people you chat with at the registration desk who don't even hesitate to let you know you are right where you are supposed to be. 

To the people who send encouraging Facebook messages and tweets saying they want to meet you. All these people show Jesus and my place where I am right now. Doesn't mean that will change slightly or the goals will shift to a different direction, but one thing I do know: God has a reason for it all. 

The valleys allow you a better appreciate for the mountaintop vantage. The struggles, the depression against the spirit as though it will never lift and this writing thing isn't really for you, all to point to a God who is mightier than it all. 

It's all FEAR. 

And FEAR is to be defeated. Identified as what is. Fear masquerades as so much: insecurities, worry, self-doubt. Rebuke it. Battle against it in the name of Jesus. 

Allow His children to speak truth over you. Pray for you. 

Lesson learned this year: SPEAK what is on your heart.

We so often hide this doubt for fear when aired for our close friends to see we will be judged for it or they won't understand. 

But fear is not meant to be kept in the darkness for Satan to continue breeding these emotions that will only kill any and all desire for what God has laid on your heart. Be honest. Trust in the faithfulness of your closest friends. I was given some of the best moments of the entire conference when I was honest about where I was and what I was struggling with.

Stop being willing to say "fine". Answer with the truth and allow your friends, the people God has place in your life, to do their divine purpose: form a blockade against the evil one and rebuke your fear in the name of Jesus.


Never doubt the place God has you. He has you there for a reason, even if you aren't sure what that reason is in the beginning.

Share your best conference memories...I would love to hear about them! 

The Value of People

Do you ever have a time when God puts exactly the right people in front of you at the right moment?

Yeah, I had that this last weekend.

ACFW was different for me this year. Funds were just NOT there to go, so up until a few weeks ago, I had no plans to go at all. And I was fine with that... until Facebook and Twitter and blogs and email loops started lighting up with every ones exciting planning. Then I just felt bummed.

But then a sweet author friend of mine (Kaye Dacus) suggested that I still go. I laughed very hard, knowing the status of my bank account.

Her suggestion though was just to go to "hang out" with people but not attend the actual conference. A group was carpooling, they had room for one more and would gladly welcome me to join them. Kaye was rooming by herself and didn't mind me crashing with her. I could go and spend very little money but still get to spend time with some of the greatest people on Earth: WRITERS!

So I went.

And oh-ma-goodness. You have NO idea how glad I am that I went. The weekend was about renewing my passion to write. Enriching my relationships with friends that I hold very dearly. And learning to trust God in all the uncertainties.

Now, I'll admit. I totally missed the "actual" conference. That I didn't get to hear Robin Jones Gunn speak was a total bummer!

But I still got my FAVORITE part of conference.

And that was PEOPLE. Hugging hold friends. Making new ones. Putting faces to names. Sometimes that little Facebook profile pic is just NOT enough!! (and then you have people like me who frequently have my kids up there instead anyway!)

Writing is a solitary effort many times. It can even get a bit lonely.

So my tip to you today is.... remember the value of PEOPLE. Both in networking, in challenging your brain beyond its comfort zone, and in just making you smile and laugh.

My favorite conference moment was arriving in the lobby... with something super heavy on my heart, and our sweet Pepper looking at me and saying, "Come on. I need to pray for you." And proceeding to hug me and pray for me right then and there.

A God moment for me, and exactly what I needed to calm my nerves and frazzled brain!!

Yup. People rock:-)

(and yes, this post is devoid of conference pictures because I've been SO BUSY since I got back that I haven't had time to look at them or really, barely breath! Thus the reason this post is late this morning too.... Krista's head NEEDS to get screwed back on straight!)

Debunking 5 Myths about Conference Appointments

As many of us make arrangements to head toward Indianapolis for the ACFW Conference, I want to share this blog I wrote a few years ago about what I learned from my first conference experience. Hope it helps those of you who are fighting bundles of nervous at the thought of meeting with editors and agents! There's really no need to be scared going into these appointments... think of them as a chat rather than a pitch, with the goal of making a connection.

Remember that high school feeling of getting caught talking in class? Maybe it wasn’t your fault. Maybe your friend in the seat beside you wanted to cheat, and you were actually saying, “No, I will not give you my answers,” but all the teacher heard was your mumbling, and next thing you knew, you were rambling on and on in some kind of ill-formed explanation of your merit.

Now imagine a line of authors feeling that exact same way–fidgeting their hands, grasping their one sheets, and considering breaking out super-sized bags of dark chocolate, the Christian version of taking shots. Maybe that’s not so hard for you to imagine. Maybe you’ve been one of those authors.

But is that the way it has to be?

Several years ago, I interviewed the now-retired Etta Wilson for my conference tour blog. Something she said about new authors struck me, and I still think about it often: “Believe in your work and be kind. We’re all in this together, and the writing and publishing of wonderful reading is a high calling for all of us.”

What if instead of panicking over our 30 second pitches as if we’re being graded, we stepped outside ourselves and remembered that ultimately we’re all in this together? How would the landscape of appointments change? Because really, editors and agents want to buy quality fiction just as much (or more) than you want to sell it.

One moment in particular at my first conference changed the entire experience for me, and in some ways, it even changed the way I look at writing. That moment was when Colleen Coble introduced me to Ami McConnell, and Ami hugged me. Hugged me.

Now, you might not understand the dynamic implications of this. See, Ami has edited almost every one of my favorite books, and I had to restrain myself from gushing so I didn’t sound like a suck-up. She probably thought nothing of hugging me, but to me it made all the difference. When I attended my appointment with her the next day, I wasn’t so scared anymore. Did she say my book was the best she’d ever seen and that she wanted to buy it immediately? No. She said I wasn’t ready yet. And you know what? I wasn’t. I realize that now. But I still came away from the appointment excited because of her encouragement.

So if my personal anecdotes aren’t enough, here are several myths I think we should debunk in striving toward professional relationships:

1) Editors and agents are monsters.

They are people too. Be nice, and don’t treat them like a one-dimensional way to get your written words disseminated. As an instructor, I know all too well how it feels when people simply want something out of you.

2) Editors and agents want to see you fail.

Actually, they want to see you succeed. Why do you think they chose this profession? Most editors and agents love the idea of finding great new talent.

3) Editors and agents are going to be mean.

At conferences like ACFW, rarely are editors and agents ever going to be unkind. Be prepared that they might offer constructive feedback, but that’s only to help you grow.

4) Editors and agents enjoy being stalked.

Okay, so most of you don’t actually believe this one, but I thought it still worth mentioning. Do not follow your favorite editor back to his or her room in hopes you’ll get to pitch. It’s perfectly fine to approach that person in a normal setting, but don’t creep them out. If you do this, don’t be surprised to see other editors running away from you.

5) Editors and agents will forget you.

I’ve saved the biggest point for last. Editors and agents have very good memories. Just because someone doesn’t request your manuscript during this conference–and most won’t–does not mean he or she will forget about you. In fact, the opposite is usually true, so that street goes both ways. Throw a fit, and that’s what you’ll be remembered by. Be gracious, and when you have another project to pitch next year, you’ll be remembered by your kindness and willingness to cooperate, which can get you far.

When all is said and done, though, just remember that you are passionate about your story and your characters. Let that passion shine through, and with some determination, you’re sure to eventually find a good match for your work.

Are you going to be at ACFW this year? How do you fight the nerves?

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Ashley Clark writes romantic comedy with southern grace. She's dreamed of being a writer ever since the thumbprint-cookie-days of library story hour. Ashley has an M.A. in English and enjoys teaching literature courses at her local university. She's an active member of ACFW and runs their newcomer's loop. When she's not writing, Ashley's usually busy rescuing stray animals and finding charming new towns. You can find Ashley on her personal blog, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. She is represented by Karen Solem.

A conference prayer

It’s almost here! ACFW 2013! I posted this prayer prior to conference last year, and want to share it again today in the hope that it will speak to someone as they prepare for the biggest event of the Christian novelist's year. 

So many hopes and expectations converge over these next few days. Let’s pray that God will be at the center of it all.

For those who are travelling… Lord, keep them safe. We ask for itineraries to run smoothly, for timely flight connections, for safety on the road, for time to reflect and relax and mentally prepare.

For those who are anxious… Lord, give them peace. In all the hurry and busyness, let them turn their minds to you and find a place of calm. Take away all anxiety and worry, pressure and expectation, and fear of the unknown. Replace these things with your perfect peace. May they rest in you.

For those attending conference for the first time… Lord, may they have the time of their lives. We pray for new friendships to be formed, for eyes and ears wide open to soak everything in, for hearts willing to learn and the confidence to go after their dreams.

For those who’ve been before… We thank you for friends old and new, for fun and laughter, for morning coffee-runs and conversations that last late into the night. We ask for eyes to see those who are lonely or in need of encouragement, and the generosity of spirit to reach out beyond themselves and help someone else along the way.

For writers who are feeling burnt out… Lord, give them fresh inspiration. Fresh ideas. Fresh joy in the craft and a renewed passion for their calling. You know those who need a little extra something this year. Those who’ve pursued their dreams for so long they’ve grown tired and discouraged along the way. Please bless them with a song in Praise and Worship, a light-bulb moment in a workshop, a word of encouragement from a respected mentor, the divine connection they so desperately need, the open door they’ve been longing for.

For writers who are pitching… Lord, please gift them with peace and clarity. Help them articulate the essence of their story with passion and heart. Give them the confidence to believe in their ideas and the grace to understand that not every editor or agent will be a perfect fit for them. We pray for a spirit of calm over the appointment tables, for great conversations between writers and industry professionals, for writers to leave their appointments feeling satisfied that they represented themselves well.

For the editors and agents… This is such a busy time for them. Amid the clamor of voices, pitches and ideas, please give them the discernment to recognize the people and projects that would be a great fit for them. Keep them sharp and alert to what your Spirit is saying. Give them the ability to filter through distraction – a noisy lunch table, an imperfect pitch from a nervous writer – and catch the heart of each idea that is offered. May they consider each project with open-mindedness, honesty and grace. When they are tired, please refresh their spirits. We pray for blessed times with colleagues, valuable professional connections, and exciting new projects to acquire.

For those who can’t go to conference… Lord, help us to trust in your good plans for our writing journey. Renew our spirits. As we hear good news and exciting stories filtering back from our writer friends at conference, may we rejoice with them whole-heartedly. We thank you for how far you’ve brought us and give you praise that the best is yet to come.

Amen.

How can we pray for you this week? Please share your prayer requests in the comments section so we can lift each other up in faith!

Images courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net

Karen Schravemade lives in Australia. When she's not chasing after her three preschool-age kids, she spends her spare minutes daydreaming about the intricate lives of characters who don't actually exist. Find her on her website and Twitter.

Preparing for Conference Season

While most of the country is reaching for lemonade and ice cream in these super hot temperatures (welcome to summer in Florida, by the way-bleh!) fall is around the corner. I promise. And that not only means cute sweaters and pumpkins, but also conference season! Huzzah!

If you're planning to attend the ACFW conference this year, did you realize it is almost exactly two months away? Is it just me, or is that really hard to believe?

So today I wanted to put together a list of some things you can do now to start preparing for the conference, and to keep you the dreaded panic that comes from waiting until the last minute.

• Research, research, research. Sometimes people spend a lot of money to attend conferences but not much time preparing. If you are going to meet with an editor or an agent, please take the time to find out what that person represents. If you write historical, you don't want to wind up pitching to someone who's only looking for YA, or vice versa. Many publishing houses have a very specific vibe that they specialize in. Take time to read books by prospective publishing houses, and see who's publishing work like yours. Then target those people. Impress editors and agents by being able to converse about their current authors. You'd be surprised by how few people do this, and it will give you the edge up.

• Start working on that one sheet. Don't wait until the last minute to get your materials ready. The sooner you get started, the more time you'll have to tweak. Your one sheet should give your title, your hook, a blurb about your story that leaves the editor/agent wanting to see more, and a bio about yourself. Our own Alley Cat Angie Dicken is offering an amazing deal on one sheet designs (only $40 per one sheet!) if you haven't already heard. You can see some examples of her work at this link: http://supamomthoughts.blogspot.com/p/cba-one-sheet-design-service.html

• Get that book ready! To pitch a project, it needs to be at least mostly done. With two months to go, you still have plenty of time to get it ready, but time's a 'ticken, so be sure you get serious about putting in that consistent word count so your project is pitch-worthy.

• Pray, pray, pray. Pray for God's favor, His appointments, His vision, and for Him to use you to minister to others. Pray for the editors and the agents and the publishing houses and the future of CBA. We 

We so desperately need to stand up as the body of Christ--and especially as Christian writers--to pray for the future of Christian fiction. If we, who are already so passionate about this field, fail to seek God's council and favor, who will? God wants to do incredible things through all of us, and I have personally seen and experienced His presence in a deep way at the ACFW conference. 

Think of it this way. Imagine if you had a relative or friend who wanted to give you something valuable, but they were waiting until you were ready, and until they could give it to you in person. They needed to know you were engaged, and that the moment was right. What if you never spoke to that person? What if you knew that gift was yours, and yet you never claimed it?

I wonder how often God is holding the gift-wrapped box out to us, hands outstretched, and waiting. How often His heart must be grieved when we close our fists and turn away.

Don't turn away. Believe He has great things for you, and seek His face until you find them.

• Leave your nerves behind. When we begin to prepare for something big in our lives, it's natural to start getting more and more nervous as the excitement builds. Everyone feels a little scared to get on that plane and take the next step. Don't let anxiety keep you from your dreams. Keep in nerves your check by reminding yourself of the vision God has cast in your life and your writing. And at the ACFW Conference in particular, people are so friendly. You'll feel like you belong there the moment you put on that ACFW lanyard and the front desk workers ask if you're a writer.

• Get those first three chapters polished! You may have a few people ask to see a writing sample if they like your story, so be sure your first three chapters are sparkling and ready to go. No time like the present to start passing those around to critique partners, moms, and best friends. Make them as good as they can be! You want to put forward the best possible reflection of yourself.

Hope this list gives you a good idea of ways you can start preparing for conference season. Are you attending any conferences this year? Do you have any tips to add to the list?

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Ashley Clark writes romantic comedy with southern grace. She's dreamed of being a writer ever since the thumbprint-cookie-days of library story hour. Ashley has an M.A. in English and enjoys teaching literature courses at her local university. She's an active member of ACFW and runs their newcomer's loop. When she's not writing, Ashley's usually busy rescuing stray animals and finding charming new towns. You can find Ashley on her personal blog, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. She is represented by Karen Solem.