Between Lisa’s insightful and lovely post yesterday about creating a sisterhood and Karen’s epic piece from December about keeping your eyes on your own paper, I’m not sure I have much to add about dealing with professional jealousy. I’m a competitive and ambitious person by nature, but I’m happy to note that jealousy hasn’t been in my top five or ten challenges in the debut year. I think that’s mostly…
Our blog topic this week is dealing with professional jealousy in the writing industry. But I’m going to flip that topic around and talk about building a sisterhood in the writing industry. I know that jealousy is a normal human emotion and we all feel it from time to time, but since I’ve been on this publishing journey, I’ve felt nothing but love and support from my fellow writers and…
I can’t remember who told me this first, but here’s the piece of writing advice that changed my life: Eyes on your own paper. I can’t tell you how many careers Comparison and her brother Jealousy have ruined. And they’re vicious. They’ll roll right into your house, take your remote, crack open a soda and put their feet up on your ottoman before you even know what’s happening. They’ll ruin…
This week on the Deb Ball, we’re talking about the green-eyed monster. I may not be a master of how to deal with envy, but I’m sadly a master of feeling it, by definition: the resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck. (Please tell me I’m not alone.) I’m pretty sure it’s an emotion linked with some of my earliest memories, and many other memories speckled along the way…
This week the Debs are talking about envy – struggling with it, learning from it. In ancient Rome, Invidia was the name for the goddess of retribution and envy, whom the Greeks called Nemesis. The ancients described her as a witch with a poison tongue and green eyes with double pupils. The word itself, invidia, comes from the Latin word invidere, or “too look too closely.” The ancients believed…
Ah, envy. What a complicated topic, especially for writers. And now comes my turn to examine the green eyed monster. First I have to distinguish envy from jealousy (sorry; writers are word nerds). Envy is when you covet what someone else has. For example, when I go to Book Passage to hear debut novelist Garth Risk Hallberg read from CITY ON FIRE as part of his publisher-funded national book tour and…
We’re talking envy this week. Envy is not something I have an issue with. The truth is, I am a highly evolved human being who finds envy a waste of time. I mean, envy isn’t even a worthy enough sin to make it into Dante’s circles of hell; envy lies in purgatory. So I am not envious. But I have this blog post to write about envy. I’ve got to…
Okay, lets just get this out in the open. I am a jealous person. I don’t want to be a jealous person. I consider it one of my worst traits. I try to keep my envy in check, but occasionally it gets the best of me. A couple of years ago I was feeling a bit lost. My year-long novel workshop had ended, and I missed the structure and comfort…
I’m obsessed with the Olympics. I don’t know where this comes from, as I’m a lot less likely to win a gold medal for anything athletic than, say, watching Veronica Mars seasons one through three back to back in a weekend. Like when I was growing up—I was never the kid who came in first in gym class. I was the one won a t-shirt from the geography teacher for…
