Melissa Lawrence

Do you set goals for your writing? And if so, do you achieve them? I think I must be addicted to goal-setting as I can't really function unless I have specific goals for every area of my life and that includes my writing. As well as yearly writing goals, which I usually set at the beginning of September, I also have monthly goals, weekly goals and daily goals. Year goals are pretty specific and usually relate to how much actual writing I hope to produce in the coming year. (Not how much I hope to sell!) Current year goals include: 1. To finish the first draft of my life story "The Emptiness at the Edge of the World". 2. To (finally!) finish my 9-12 novel "Dear Egg" and send it out to agents. 3. To write twelve new short stories including flash fiction. I also have some "recommendations" for the coming year based on my progress (or lack of it!) last year and they include: 1. To focus more on magazine markets and less on competitions. 2. To co

Just a very brief post this week as I'm about to take a much needed few days off (it's hard work setting up a portfolio career!) but there is just time to tell you about Freelance Market News. In case you don't already subscribe, this is a very useful magazine edited by Angela Cox and linked to The Association of Freelance Writers. In fact, if you subscribe, you automatically get a membership card for the Association which is quite useful if you are ever in a situation where you need to prove that you are a writer. (Yes, OK. You could prove it by actually writing something but you know what I mean.) Freelance Market News ( http://www.freelancemarketnews.com ) is published 11 times a year and each issue contains detailed market information for a wide range of magazines and newspapers (including overseas ones), competition news, details of editorial changes, filler markets, a book of the month, a letters page, a "How To" article and a writing competition for subsc

Last week I blogged about coping with rejection after I had eight rejections all at once. (If I could work out how to link back to that post I would but I can't so I'm afraid you'll just have to take my word for it or scroll down the page!) A couple of days later, I came across a really helpful article in the 2011 edition of the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook (A&C Black) by a coach and trainer called Alison Straw. The article is called "Dealing With Rejection" and if you have a copy of the book (and I'm sure you have!) you can find it on page 659. Alison outlines nine (I would have had to do ten!) key points on managing rejection and building up resistance to it, all of which I found extremely useful. Some of her suggestions include pausing and letting the dust settle, channelling negative emotions about the rejection into positive activity, asking others for advice, focusing on success and trying again. It may be stuff we already know but

What do you do when you get eight rejections in one day? Actually, it was the middle of the night in my case and it happened last Sunday. And before you ask why my postman is working such irregular hours, I should point out that these were not the "large white envelopes lying on the mat" type of rejections. These were the sort you get when you finally decide it's time to check the websites of all the poetry and short story competitions you entered three months ago, in the hope that you actually won first prize in all of them but the competition organisers haven't got round to notifying you yet. Although I've had multiple rejections before, this was a bit of a low point. This was partly because I broke my own record and also because I was so convinced I was going to be the winner of one particular flash fiction competition that I stared at the computer screen for about ten minutes, unable to accept the fact that I hadn't even made the long list. (My entry for