Tag: writing

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The Journey Doesn’t End at a Closed Door

January 11, 2019January 11, 2019 jcladyluv

on the other side of the door

As I started this year with all of the excitement and anticipation of anyone dead set on taking their dreams to the next level I sat and thought about something that my pastor preached about a few weeks ago. He talked about not just asking God for what it is that you want out of your life but believing and knowing that God will do for you all that he promised he would do. The important part of his message that he spoke about was how sometimes we allow our impatience and our discouragement hold us back from getting all of the things that we’ve been asking God for. We want what we want right at that moment and somehow we think that if it doesn’t happen on the time table that we had in our mind that it means that it’s never going to happen at all.

I think that that’s what I have been doing, unknowingly of course, but I’ve been so impatient. It sounds funny saying that when I think about the fact that I’ve been at this for over a decade now but if I think back there have been so many moments where I felt like a breakthrough might have been coming but then an obstacle presented itself. Instead of holding steady and pushing through that door which was simply stuck, I turned and went backwards trying to trace my missteps to figure out what I missed that would have made the door open easier and quicker. The truth is, in those moments where I turned and tried to see where I went wrong my energy would have been better spent trying to push through that door that was just stuck, not locked, simply hard to open.

There isn’t a set time where everything is just supposed to magically come together. Just because the results aren’t immediate or as fast paced as you think they should be doesn’t mean you’re not making progress. Everything that is worth having has been won in a struggle. We have to stop putting a time table on our dreams and making it as if they’re not worth striving for if they don’t happen at the precise moment we want them to.

There will always be a different door at the turning point of any moment in your journey and what’s on the other side of it won’t always be easy to access but we can’t give up and we can’t turn back trying to create our own do-over. Now it’s true that there are some doors that were meant to be closed in order for others to open but we can’t confuse what’s not meant for us to open with what just appears to be too hard to open. We have to just push through, no matter how hard we have to push, until we knock that door down. Don’t walk away before you finally get everything that it is you’ve been waiting for. The journey isn’t over just because you have to stay in the same place for a little while longer than you initially planned. Keep pushing through those doors because the next level is coming!

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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Dreams Don’t Die, They Simply Change, and That’s Okay

January 7, 2019January 7, 2019 jcladyluv

dreams don't die 1

One of my first childhood dreams for my future was when I was somewhere between eight and nine and just knew that I was going to be a New York Time’s Best Selling Author by the age of thirty. Needless to say that has not yet come true and I am almost forty. I spent a lot of time last year continuing work on my novels all while submitting other novels to various agents. I got a rejection letter from almost all of them (some still haven’t responded yet, which I suppose is a response in itself) but they weren’t the regular form rejection letters. They were all nice and complimentary of how well my writing is and how the story sounded intriguing yet it was not particularly what they were looking for. There were a few who even made some suggestions of certain areas of the story in which to make it a little stronger but still making sure to let me know that they thought I had great potential of getting traditionally published down the road.

I suppose that the fact that they didn’t send back something generic and formal and actually took time out of their already busy schedules to personalize my rejection a little more means something but in the end a rejection is still just that. I’m not going to lie, I was beginning to doubt myself and my writing ability just a little bit but then I decided that this year was going to be the year of no excuses and I was not going to let someone else’s approval stop me from putting my work out there. Truthfully, that I’m not further along in my career as a published novelist (and not just someone with about four or five novels just sitting completed on a flash drive) is my own fault.

My first time being published was back in 2010, and it was by a small publishing house, and if I look back now I honestly wasn’t ready for the business part of being a published novelist. I was also a little too excited and a little too naïve in thinking that this small publishing house would do the same things as a traditional publishing house, in terms of marketing and publicity. I wasn’t really knowledgeable about social media and how best to use it to market myself and when it came to promoting my own book, well I tended to shy away from putting myself out there. I know more about social media now as opposed to what I knew then and I think I am more ready now then I was then to be published.

You know they say be careful what you ask for because you just might get it and in terms of receiving something that you’re simply not ready for yet, that saying couldn’t be more true. I used to tell people that I regretted my first experience with publishing because I didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t know what I had gotten into when I signed with that small publishing house. It wasn’t a very successful experience and I had expected to just be able to write and let someone else handle the rest. That was misguided thinking but now those lessons that that experience taught me are priceless.

Now, because of that experience, as I get ready to reenter the arena as a published author by publishing my own work, I understand all of the work that the process will entail and while I am not yet a marketing or social media genius, I am substantially better at it then I was then and what I don’t know or understand I am prepared to research and learn. I was smart enough then to make sure that I got my rights back to my novel that was published back then in a reasonable time and I plan on republishing that novel (possibly renaming it what I wanted to name it to begin with) because I still believe in the story that lied within those pages.

We tend to waste time trying to control things that are not within our control instead of focusing on what is. We do ourselves a great disservice when we hold onto the notion that we can somehow go back and change the mistakes that we made before. Sometimes we have to learn how to let go of the dream that we started out with and grab on to the dream that has bloomed where the old one once was. Now I’m not saying that I don’t still desire to be published with a traditional publishing house but this is the year of no excuses right, so to waste time waiting for that to happen when I have ISBN #’s waiting to be used for my own novels would be pointless. The things I dreamed for myself ten or fifteen years ago aren’t really gone, they’ve just morphed into newer, bolder dreams that require me to have the courage to let what once was go and grab onto what can be now. Are you ready to let go of the dreams that didn’t survive your past and grab onto the dreams of your future?

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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Write the Vision and Make It Plain

October 9, 2018 jcladyluv

“Then the Lord answered me and said: Write the Vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time; But at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; Because it will surely come, It will not tarry.”

~ Habakkuk 2:2

Write the vision and make it plain post

So I was listening to the Steve Harvey Morning show the other morning and it was the end of the show when he usually imparts some words of wisdom for his listeners. This morning he talked about writing your goals and your vision down. He made a point that (and I’m paraphrasing) writing down the goals helps you to visualize the vision in a way that you can’t visualize it if it just remains in your head.

Hearing that made me think about when my focus had gotten off track before and all of the times that I have been thrown off my writing flow it had been during a time frame where I had stopped writing down my goals and my dreams for one reason or another. For someone like me who is a planner, and who likes to have most things planned out to the tee it is hard for me to operate when I don’t have things planned out. I struggle to tow the line between planning things out excessively and not planning things at all to try and not be so obsessive. I think that I’ve realized that I need the structure of planning things out because it is how I am able to see the bigger picture.

There are plenty of people who like to tell me how unattainable my dreams are and all of the reasons that none of them will ever materialize into reality. I will even admit that sometimes I let their rejection of my aspirations deter me from the end goal. However, having them written out, having a vision board that shows me what my end game is, having a certain amount of belief in my overall vision, is what focuses me in the end. It’s not that having a physical representation of my dreams quiets the naysayers, but rather it helps me tune out their voices of belittlement (most of the time anyway) and persevere in the vision that I have, the purpose in which God gave me.

It is so much easier to fight for a dream in which you can visualize what it would look like to reach that goal. It’s true that you can’t see years into the future and that there’s no real way to predict how it all will turn out but you still have to keep your eyes on the road ahead of you to get yourself to the next part in the journey. If you have nothing to aim for, no goal in your sights, then what are you really working towards. Can you see what the end goal will be? Can you visualize your journey? Visualize and believe in yourself! The season you’re in right now is not the season that you will stay in forever!

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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Getting Back into the Writer’s Flow of Things

October 3, 2018October 3, 2018 jcladyluv

Back in the writing flow of things (27)

So I know that I’ve been missing in action and it has been quite a while since I last wrote and I didn’t mean for it to take me so long to get back in the rhythm of things but you know how creativity strikes, or rather in some cases doesn’t strike. I had hit a creative wall and it wasn’t necessarily a lack of ideas, but a lack of knowing how to focus my ideas in a productive manner. I actually think that a part of my issue is that I have too many ideas and in a perfect world I would be able to do the work of ten people all at once and be able to get all of my ideas off the ground and running all at the same time. Alas, this is most certainly not a perfect world, and I am only one person with only two hands and I can not multiply myself the way I need to in order to get a lifetime worth of accomplishments done in a short period of time. I suppose if I hadn’t spent a large amount of wasted time second guessing every idea I’ve had, and every dream I’ve wanted to go after then I could have produced more of my ideas by now.

I got a boost of writing motivation when I participated in this writing challenge in September. It was Tara-Nicholle Nelson’s 10 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders (you can find out more about by looking it up through Facebook) and it was a very cathartic experience doing this challenge and left me feeling surprisingly vulnerable, but in a good way, because that was the reason I did the challenge. It’s not like I haven’t been a part of writing groups in the past (albeit not for long) or have done challenges such as this one but I never really allowed myself to really be vulnerable in them and I was more of an observer in those and less of a sharer. With this challenge I actually shared a bit of myself, and while I admit I could’ve shared a lot more (something I have to work on) for me it was still a huge step. I got to interact with some extremely talented individuals who allowed themselves to be equally as vulnerable.

I feel like I’ve been missing that interaction with other creative minded people because at one point in my life I was consistently in the orbit of a couple of select people who were creative like me and we bounced ideas off each other and gave each other feedback. Then suddenly the few select creative minded people had vanished. I mean they were still around but their lives blossomed into a different direction and they moved away and got busy and their careers bloomed and they went on to find groups of other creative minded people where they were now at and I was still stuck. It was no one’s fault or anything, just that it was their turn to bloom and grow and it wasn’t mine (yet). I still love them and I root for them but I had lost that outlet and I haven’t found a new one yet.

The recent challenge I did got my creative brain really flowing again and I loved every day of it and the people that I connected with there. Now I’m in the right mind-set to prepare for National Novel Writing Month and that excites me so much because I was afraid that I wasn’t going to be able to participate this year for lack of creative inspiration. Now if I don’t write here anymore this month it’s not because I’m not writing at all because I’ll be outlining my novel for NaNoWriMo. I will also be blogging at least three times a week in the month of November as I go through the NaNoWriMo experience and hopefully a few of you will join me in doing NaNoWriMo as well. Until next time…. Keep Writing!

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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Plant Seeds, Water Dreams, and Persist Until Success Blooms

June 29, 2018June 29, 2018 jcladyluv

planting the Seeds of Dreams 2 I’ve been thinking a lot about the time limits we impose upon ourselves when it comes to getting the things we want done. For a planner like me who had her life plans mapped out from the time I was ten years old it is extremely disheartening when things get thrown so far off course that you don’t even recognize the road you’re on anymore. A childhood friend of mine read my blog post the other day about going back to the beginning of a dream and provided some much needed words of encouragement that I needed to hear. He reminded me that just because I have not yet accomplished the things that I thought I would have by now that it doesn’t mean that I won’t. He reminded me that a lot of times the success comes later on in life and he let me know that he still believed in me as he always had since the 8^th grade poem that a group of us wrote together.

True enough, my plans for making an established career as a writer have not worked out quite the way that I envisioned but I’m not completely sure that I would change things. I can say that now because hindsight is twenty-twenty and looking back at some of the things that certain detours in my plan have brought into my life (one main blessing being my daughter) I can honestly say that I wouldn’t trade the experiences that I’ve had or the obstacles that I have had to work through for anything. I think that when I finally do reach the position in my writing career that I am striving for that those same obstacles and experiences will provide a great foundation for the lasting success that I saw for myself from the very beginning.

There are no time limits on when a person can achieve the success that they are looking for in life. We would like to get to the level of success we desire in a hurry and sometimes that can end up being to our detriment because far too often people aren’t really truly ready for the success they are seeking. I think that we’re often tested to gauge whether or not we’re even serious about what it is that we say we want. Will we throw our dreams away at the first sign of a major hurdle? Will we get halfway down the path to our goals and then get so impatient with how long it’s taking that we turn and double back before we’ve even reached the end of the road? Just how important could our dreams be if we run away from them at the first sign of resistance?

I think things happen for a reason, be it good or bad, and we have to be sure that the journey we are on has our full commitment and that our plans of action matches our level of desire. We can’t just quit on the dreams we have because it gets a little harder than we thought it would be to achieve them. They say that the hardest battles come with the sweetest victories so just imagine how sweet the success will be if you don’t give up on the goal just because the storm became too hard to bear. You’ve already planted the seed so just make sure you keep watering the dream!

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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Back To the Beginning of the Dream

June 20, 2018 jcladyluv

Back to the beginning of a dream

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I felt when I first felt I was meant to become a writer. I was only 6 years old when I realized the way that words can affect people and when I knew that writing was what I wanted to do with my life. However, I was 10 when the words finally began to come to me, first in the form of poetry, and then in the form of telling stories. I’ve always had a wild imagination and when I started writing I felt so confident in my talent and my abilities to craft a story and to express my feelings through the art of poetry.

In fact, at that age, and with such low self esteem in so many other areas, it was just about the only thing I was confident and sure about. My passion for writing then was like no other that I had ever felt or have felt since. I worked relentlessly on my craft, night and day, oftentimes neglecting sleep just so I could get the ideas down. I studied different styles of writing, I’ve studied and continue to learn from other writers and I love every single aspect of the craft of writing.

The business side of writing however, the tedious marketing strategy that goes into getting your words out there in front of other people, the networking that is required of a strongly introverted person to do, that is the one aspect that I am not entirely passionate about doing. Throughout the years I have been hardened by the rejection that has come with dealing with the business side of writing, the constant revolving doors of no’s. If it were up to me I would just write and let someone else who’s good at the business part do that side of things.

My passion for making a living with my writing hasn’t weened but I think somewhere along the line the confidence I had in myself as a writer has been battered and bruised a little. The lack of business savvy that I have when it comes to writing has taken the wind out of my sails just a bit. I’ve started to question myself more and more about whether or not I am really good enough and do my words really matter that much. I keep letting the fear of everything that’s not working in my favor influence the drive towards what I know in my heart I’m meant to do and that’s because the confidence I had in the beginning has been damaged. I realize that I have to go back to the beginning, to when I felt sure about my writing.

Now obviously, making a living as a writer there’s no way to get around the business aspect of writing because financially I am not in a place where I can just hire someone else to deal with it and simply write. But I realize that I have to have more creative days where I solely focus on the craft of writing and not how I’m going to get it out there. I still love writing. To be able to write is like being able to breathe to me. I have to return back to what made me really love writing to begin with and I have to nurture that passion. I think that I had gotten so focused on the other stuff that I was starting to lose the part of the craft that fed my soul. I don’t ever want to lose that part of being a writer. Sometimes we have to go back to the beginning of a dream to make sure that we get back on the right path that will enable us to see it through.

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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An Agent of Change

June 14, 2018June 14, 2018 jcladyluv

agent of change 3

There’s something about myself that I readily admit to people but that I am not entirely proud of. I absolutely do not like (strongly detest) change. I like things to be a certain way, I have a routine that I follow, pretty much to the tee and I don’t particularly like to deviate from that routine. In my mind it keeps things balanced, it keeps things flowing smoothly and it keeps a sense of order. Well at least that’s what I had convinced myself of.

I’ve been working a lot more over the last couple of years on my spiritual growth and on improving my relationship with God. I’ve been steadily working on following God’s instructions for my life and the direction that he wants it to go in. It’s a path that has brought me so much peace and joy and it has helped me rediscover who I am again. I hadn’t even realized that I had somehow lost who I was and forgotten what it was I was supposed to be doing, my purpose.

Sitting in church the other day as my pastor talked about growth, and that change equals growth so if you hate change than you can’t grow. It was a moment of clarity (one of many I have had recently). He spoke about how if you’re listening to God’s instructions for your life and following the path he wants you to be on, which is not always the path you had intended to take, then you have to be willing to open yourself up to something different, something new. You can’t hear the instructions for your life and then, because they don’t exactly fall in line with your daily routine, just not take action on the instructions that you have been given.

I’m a creature of habit and I had always led myself to believe that it wasn’t entirely a bad thing that I had set plans, set times in which to do things, set days in which to work on this or that, that I knew what I would be doing any given day at any given time because it would be the same. I call it routine but some might call it being stuck and unmoving. They would be right. I had never thought of my growing habitual routines as being afraid of changing but I can see now that it was exactly what I was afraid of doing.

If I changed things what if something bad happened. If I changed my routine what if the outcome was a bad one. I think I had gotten to a point where I had just made it so that nothing would happen that I didn’t already know was going to happen. That way there would be no bad outcomes, there would be no rejection, and no one could say no. I didn’t realize that it also meant that nothing good could happen either, and that no one could say yes. How could I say I was open to new opportunities of any kind if I was unwilling to change?

It’s not going to be easy to dial back my need for having a habitual routine. It’s opening myself up for an outcome that I don’t know and the thought of that is downright frightening. However, if I truly want to grow and reach new goals, and soar to new heights I have to be willing to change.

Change can be scary but it’s critical in order for us to grow. We can’t get so hung up on sticking to what we know and what our routine is that we miss the opportunities that are waiting for us right outside our little box. The box is good at times and we tell ourselves that the box protects us but does it really? Or does that box that we try so hard to keep ourselves in only hinder us from reaching our fullest potential? Our greatest accomplishments and our highest of heights tend to lie beyond the confines of the box of comfort that we trap ourselves in.

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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Along the Way

April 20, 2018April 20, 2018 jcladyluv

Along the way

Let’s talk about appreciating your journey! When you are pursuing your goals and dreams there is no telling just how long the journey will be to reach your destination. If you are low in the patience department like I am then you want more than anything for it all to come together overnight. You want to be able to map out an efficient plan, put in the action, and quickly see the rewards of all of your hard work and effort.

We can sometimes get so caught up in the end game of what our plans are that we take for granted the small victories that happen along the way. We don’t take the time to celebrate the accomplishments that we manage to achieve as we go along. We want the pace towards success to be quick and preferably painless but that’s not the reality of most people’s journey in life. We even waste time comparing the trajectory of other people’s journey to ours. We get so busy looking over on their road, trying to see how fast they’re going that we miss the scenery of our own journey.

Your journey is your own and you should go at whatever pace is comfortable for you but don’t miss out on the journey trying to rush the process. Stop dwelling on the things that you haven’t been able to check off of your list yet. Appreciate where you are right now and the progress that you have made so far. Don’t rush the journey. Instead, take your time to enjoy the scenery along the way!

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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The Words We Tell Ourselves

April 11, 2018 jcladyluv

Be Careful what you say to yourself

Let’s talk about self-doubt! I think everyone can admit, if they are being honest with themselves, that they talk to themselves. We tend to debate with our own conscience and question our every move, oftentimes second guessing things that we instinctually believe to be good initial decisions. We are sometimes our biggest champions but we can also tend to be our own worst critics. If something doesn’t go the way we think it should, or the way that we had planned it to go we lose a little bit of hope each time our plans falter. The problem that I don’t think that we realize we are inviting is that we are now speaking negative outcomes to things that we have positive intentions for.

It does no good to speak positively about what we are wishing to accomplish and then turn around and name all of the reasons that we think will cause us to inevitably fail. That negative self-talk that we do to ourselves is precisely what can change the course of things because now we’ve spoken negativity into the goals and dreams that we once had such a positive outlook on. There is no guarantee how anything that we map out will ever go so to talk ourselves down from following through with any idea we have, already assuming that it won’t become a reality, is just us sabotaging ourselves.

We have to be more mindful of how we talk to ourselves. We have to take special care to make sure that we are not talking ourselves out of things simply because we’re afraid that we may not succeed in it. We have to make sure that we are not talking down to our own inner conscience and that the negativity that someone else may be projecting onto you doesn’t get ingrained within our deepest thoughts. We have to make sure that we are our biggest and loudest cheerleaders and that the criticism that we give ourselves isn’t negative but rather constructive. How you talk to yourself matters, probably more than anything anyone could ever say to you. So be kind to yourself and always believe in the power that is within you. You are your greatest champion!

Jimmetta Carpenter

Writer/Editor

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