Ginger Hendrix, Writer

You've Found Ginger Hendrix, Writer.

You've found Ginger Hendrix, Writer. Home of Wienerdog Tricks, Mannishly, Time to Make and a good list of other spots on the interwebs. 

If you'd like to work with me, that would be just lovely--I'm a solid writing coach. I've been helping writers get unstuck for about 20 years. Send me a quick email about where you are on your project. (Haven't started? Stuck in the middle? Having to face an old draft? Lost completely?) I'd love to sit down with you or meet up virtually about your process and help to get you moving along.

You don't have to stay stuck.

 

How Public Rejection Sucks

A couple of months back, I put up a free class on Skillshare, a sort of beginner's guide to getting started at the sewing machine. And, you know, I did it the Ginger way. Pulled in good gob of goofiness so that I could have fun doing it. 

Then yesterday, I got my first real, nasty kind of public comment about it. And, of course, there is the thing of how we always focus on the bad reviews and not the good ones, but there's got to be more than just that too. Something about the hiding that wants to come when the bad news voices come at us. 

I've written thousands and thousands of words about this failure loop, but it never stops intriguing me. So I thought I would just go ahead and list publicly here my best rejection to date--think of this as a christmas gift to you and to me (something almost as tasty as watching ice skaters fall in competition):

Drumroll...

The former university student who wrote: "she is a dry humored left wing cocky bitch..."

And I have to say that after years of receiving public blips of out-in-the-world rejection, this one is still my absolute favorite. It's the one I prefer to quote when anybody else starts to talk about their own rejection and somehow it accidentally turns into a competition.

Score!

And why is this a Christmas post because there is not a single red and green picture included here, and also rejection doesn't seemed related to baby Jesus in the manger or blackFriday or Christmas morning breakfast casseroles in any way that we can muster the connection?

Because we offer our real stuff up to the world in moments of our souls' Christmastimes, those pull-out-from-the-routine moments when we say that other stuff doesn't matter, and that we know we're just supposed to pop a love note in the mail, or spend more money on a gift than we really should, or eat plates and plates of cheese potatoes followed by cookies with sprinkles around a folding table at our holiday office lunch without a single thought of how we will want to go to sleep by 2 and also not be able to fit into our pants tomorrow.

And this courage for jumping to spring up and dive in is a precious thing, a sort of fragile thing that we can't let the world keep us from.

So I raise a glass to you at this holiday time, as you're making your humble crafty gifts happily at night, and then wondering if they're good enough to send in the morning. And I say: stay at it. Glue and glue your heart away.  Sew and crochet and paint into the night. Rubber stamp out all of your real feelings for the people you love. 

And keep in mind always, that not a single one of your friends or relatives will call you something as mean as "dry-humored" for sending what you made.

Introducing Fay from Fargo

I've just slated myself to teach a class over at Skillshare and am employing the help of the much-loved Mary Lou Stevens Reed, and this new gem of a friend: Fay from Fargo.

Meet Fay from Fargo from ginger hendrix on Vimeo.

The Mega-Beginner class on sewing machine basics and fabric construction, called--so far--"Build with Fabric: Don't Sew" should be live for enrollment next month. The project: "Upgrade Your Ugly Pillows with Covers."

Skillshare gives anybody a chance to teach a project-based class. I'm game to have a go. Plus, I think you and I both know that I'll try just about anything to hang out with Mary Lou Stevens Reed and good people like Fay (who came to me out of my thankfulness for the good friends I've newly made at Modern Textiles in Fargo, North Dakota).

Fay is, I might add, an Improvisational Poet and former Home Economics Teacher. Awesome combo. More to come.

Introducing Mary Lou Stevens Reed

I realized that I could save GOBS of cash this Christmas if I just MADE SMALLER STOCKINGS. Omg I have been using stockings meant for giants for years now. And they're annoyingly expensive to fill. #momproblem.

This 26 minutes video offers up step-by-step instructions for making a lINED Christmas Stocking...plus you get to meet Mary Lou Stevens Reed, in her first cameo appearance in one my teaching videos. She's a keeper.

 

The Upside of DIY Publishing: Sometimes You Get A Tiny Piece of Dragon Novel Tucked In Your Book (Like a Prize)

I think I've landed on the term "DIY Publishing" to describe what I did with Time to Make .

I used Amazon's Createspace, a fairly seamless print-on-demand service. I'm not crazy about calling it "self-publishing"--this has images of some guy paying gobs of cash to sneak his book out onto the market. It's just him and some Sneaky, Expensive, Non-Actual Publisher.

That's not how this project went for me. I talked about it on my blog, figured out ways to pay extremely talented people little stacks of cash combined with handmade offerings, and (believe me) there was a publisher: it was me and a host of helpers: a posse of Wienerdog Tricks blog readers who piped in after reading early early drafts; a really, really good editor (the best I've had since the Big 3 hit grad school together reading each other's work in Hudson's booths); a committed blog designer-turned-font-specialist; and a cover designer who basically let me into her house to sit next to her a bunch of times until we were both able to squeeze what was in my head out of her fingers, and a couple of loving, a couple of dear friends who sat up with me through the whole project (and di things like make me eggs on vacation so I could finish the final layout edits). 

I wasn't alone. This wasn't a Ging-only sort of a deal. 

And it's funny to think that the primary reason I didn't want to sit nicely and wait for a Big Guy Publisher to give me a Yes to publishing (I mean, in addition to the fact that I was writing about just going for it and not waiting around for anybody to tell you that you can)--was that I just didn't want to wait that long.

And then this project took a year and a half.

But man did I learn a lot...

1. I now know that I love to collaborate. I'm not so hot at contracting work out (like in the "I will deftly explain my wants and needs and you, Kind Professional, and you will carry them out for me in a sufficient manner" sort of way). I'm really good at [getting people to expand their willingness to be] sitting down and working shoulder-to-shoulder until the thing is done.

2. I now appreciate what publishers do (which I would like to say out loud right here is scads more than I'd imagined.) Apparently, they're the people who make the 3 gazillion tiny decisions that need to be made when you publish a book. Thanks, Them, for all those other books they made.

3. I learned that I can do a lot more than I thought I could: longest written piece I've ever even aimed for much less somehowpulledoff; newly-found very basic knowledge of inDesign; increased capacity for explaining the doodles that live in my own head; sort of increased patience sort of.

4. I learned that every time I thought I knew what was coming next, I was wrong.

And now, because of DIY Publishing, I also own a copy of my own book with a random 27-page spread of somebody else's Dragon Fiction. And this, people, is absolutely priceless to me. 

Because I just wrote a book about how the things you make may or may not always turn out the way you thought they would, and how this is okay, and how it's sort of scary and tempting to never make something because of this possibility. But how you should do it anyway.

And then some really nice person at the quality control line in South Carolina took a tiny little smoke break for a second and this one copy snuck through to me--like a gift from the Wonkaphobia Gods.

Thank you, WG's. I mean it. This could have landed in anyone's hands, but you guys sent it to me.

You rock. I'll keep it forever.