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Editor's Note: I was paid by BlogHer to write this post and conduct discussions on Chime.in. But the discussions were about blogs to books, so, you know, they didn't have to twist my arm very hard. Also, there's a really, really good giveaway at the end of this post.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by social media? I mean, here you are, reading this blog, so it's not like you don't know anything about it, and it's not like I don't, either, but I'll admit ever since there was more than blogging, I've felt like it's too much. I can't keep up with Facebook at all. I talk on Twitter, and I usually talk back to anyone who talks to me, but I don't try to keep up with everything everyone says. It's too much. As my good friend Average Jane put it back when the world Twitter was young, Twitter is a stream that you step in and out of at will, and you don't worry about what happened when you weren't there.

So now I've joined Tumblr and Pinterest and Google+ and most recently, Chime.in.

I heard about Chime.in at BlogHer Writers '11 because it was a sponsor, and I just joined because I am going to be leading a discussion about blogs and books for the next week. If you're interested in those topics, please do come join me.

I'm going to keep Chime.in about blogs and books, just as I've kept Tumblr straight about publishing and Pinterest completely random. Facebook, hell, I don't know what I'm doing at Facebook, but I'm 100% sure I'm not using it correctly. Twitter is just where I talk to online friends -- most of my real-life friends look at me cross-eyed when I talk about tweeting. That's how I'm managing all of this new social media, and I've found once I hit my stride at how I personally am categorizing things, it's something I look forward to using. I'm not trying to become a design queen on Pinterest -- I'm just pinning some things that are either pretty or really random. With Chime.in, I hope to be mentoring. I really enjoyed mentoring the anthology group at BlogHer Writers '11, and as I have done something of a blog to book, or at least anthologized blogs to books, I hope to pass along a little advice and encouragement this month at Chime.in.

Things I like about Chime.in so far:

• Really easy to join. Sign in with Twitter or Facebook. Sort of like robbing from Peter to pay Paul, except all of them are free. Or something. I'm not actually sure where this analogy is going.
• You can search on your interests and it just hands you groups to follow. I followed the bookish groups, since I've already decided how I'm going to specialize on Chime.in.
• Social media multi-tasking: Whatever you chime you can also send to Facebook and Twitter. I really appreciate this feature, because I have different friends on different platforms, and I like it that way. Let the randoms who for some crazy reason are following me on Google+ see my broadcast links there, and I'll stick to blogging and books on Chime.in. But you know, sometimes I might want to tweet it just to be absolutely crazy. I like having the option, regardless.

Those who have questions about blogs to books here in the past or those who are just curious? Join my thread on Chime.in. I'm hoping I'll get some questions over there, but if not, you know, I'll just talk about what happened to me.

And, as is awesome, after giving away two nooks on my review blog, I now get to give away a Kindle Fire. Yes, yes, yes. Comment here or participate in my blog-to-books discussions on Chime.in to enter. Official rules are here. My part of the contest ends on Monday, November 7 at midnight CT. Comments or discussions on Chime.in timestamped after midnight CT on November 7 won't be eligible for my part of the contest. But get ready -- I'm not the only blogger participating. My friends and colleagues Stephanie O'Dea, Karen Ballum of Sassymonkey Reads and Diane Lang of Momo Fali have Kindle Fires to give away, too!

• Tuesday, November 1 - Monday November 7 -- win here -- GIVEAWAY CLOSED: Congratulations, Linda Sherwood!
• Tuesday, November 8 - Monday November 14 -- win with Stephanie O'Dea Enter here -- GIVEAWAY CLOSED: Congratulations, Cheryl Moore!
• Tuesday, November 15 - Monday November 21 -- win with Momo Fali here and Matt Logelin here!
• Tuesday, November 22 - Monday November 28 -- win with Sassymonkey

See you there!

In 1998, I moved to Kansas City from Chicago in search of a new start. In 1999, I enrolled in the graduate writing program at the University of Missouri -- Kansas City. I kept working full time, and it took me four years to complete a two-year program ... four years of nights and weekends spent absorbing a novel a week, my short stories and poetry, detailed analyses of the merits or not of some other writer's work. 

Whenever someone asked me why I was doing it, I replied it wasn't for my work, I just wanted the degree.

I lied to myself.

I was afraid I couldn't make it as a writer, and if I told everyone I was going back to school to get better at it, then of course they would expect me to fulfill on that expectation. At the time, I'd been writing since third grade but had only had a few poems published here in there in the sort of chapbooks short on white space and long on printing margins. And also? The writing program itself was quickly shattering my confidence.

Advanced degrees will do that. You might be a big fish in the little pond of high school or even college, but when you get into a masters program, everyone there is paying dearly in money and time to accomplish something -- and they might be better at it than you are.

My ego took a huge beating. I had never undergone a serious writers workshop before -- the kind in which you turn in your short story and then sit there, silent, taking notes, while everyone around you describes what they liked and hated about it. They always started with the encouragement, of course, and I appreciated that, but I was eager and remiss to get to the part that would actually improve the work -- the critiques. And, they were sort of brutal. At that point in my writing career, my skin was translucent, it was so thin. I couldn't even handle criticism of my grammar, let alone my characters or plot. I held it together in class, usually, but the drive home would be clouded by tears. The worst part? The classes were at night, so they always ended at nineish or later and I would go home and be up until midnight contemplating my writerly sins.

Then I'd get up and go to work and if anyone asked, I'd tell them I just wanted to be a better writer, even if it never went anywhere.

And that was a lie.

Last Friday, I was gratified to spend a mind-blowing day with a bunch of truth-tellers at BlogHer Writers '11. 

Beginning Thursday night with the opening reception, I talked to writers who were being completely honest with themselves: They wanted to write a book. They wanted to succeed. They were prepared to own that, with all the fear of rejection and potential social humiliation that might come of it. It wasn't a huge group -- around 200 or so -- and I got a chance to talk to probably a third of them over the course of the day. My biggest takeaway? 

Stop lying to yourself. 

Stop telling yourself you don't really care.

Stop telling yourself you can't handle rejection.

Stop telling yourself you'll only try until a certain date or some other arbitrary deadline.

Stop telling yourself you can only achieve success by one path.

Stop telling yourself it matters to your friends or family if you don't hit it out of the park immediately.

Stop telling yourself you have no platform, nothing to share.

Stop telling yourself the only book you have in you is based on your blog.

Start listening to writers like Kathy Cano-Murillo, Jean Kwok, Ann Napolitano and Dominique Browning who shared their roads to success, bumps and all, and realize it's never painless, it's never easy, and it's always worth it.

Start believing in yourself (a command delivered to me by someone I was supposedly mentoring, ouch, when I fell back into I'm-an-imposter patterns out loud, eek).

Start setting smaller goals: 500 words, one query, one scene outlined. Move forward every week, no matter how tiny that move might feel.

Start surrounding yourself with positive people and other writers.

Start reading everything you can get your hands on and noting what you like or don't like about that writer's style.

Start scheduling time with yourself to work on your craft. Schedule it like it's a meeting or you won't do it.

Start saying "when" instead of "if." Success comes to those who are relentless in their pursuits.

Start telling yourself the truth. In my case, the truth is this: I want to be a published novelist. I wish it were enough for me to be a published anthologist, but it's not. So I'm taking the next steps.

I left on Saturday morning having spent a lot more time alone with my thoughts than I normally do at conferences. On the plane ride home, I took a lot of notes for the next novel and made lists of how I could support the one I'm currently querying. It occurred to me if you had told 1999 Rita walking into UMKC's registrar's office for the first time I'd be doing that on the way home from speaking at a national writing conference, I would've punched you for getting my hopes up. Back then, I was afraid to hope.

Funny how the world works.

Okay, so I realized I work at BlogHer. And I also realize I am moderating a panel at BlogHer Writers '11. So this is going to look very fake and sales-y, and that's actually not what I'm all about. I will be very direct if I am doing that.  Here is me being direct: I'm writing this post of my own volition and speaking only for me, not for BlogHer in any, way, shape or form. 

Now bear with me while I jump up and down around my library for a second, throwing hardbacks in the air with glee for the love of publishing. Ouch. Of course one just hit me in the head.

I am just really excited about this because it's going to be chock-full of Penguin Publishing editors, authors and publicists as well as a bunch of bloggers who have crossed the print line. And anyone who has read this blog ever knows that I am a publishing fiend, unable to resist any opportunity to find out more about the world's most confusing business. You'd think I'd know everything after a book, right? 

That is not true. Especially with what's happened in the past five years to publishing. 2008 feels like 25 years ago, not four.

There are no guarantees in life, but it never hurts to try for the face-to-face if the opportunity presents itself. 

The conference is three weeks away. It's in NYC. It's only one day -- Friday, October 21. There are basically two tracks -- one for newbies, one for people like me who have been through the publishing wringer before and have the glutton-for-punishment need to do it again. You can get the whole schedule here.

I'm moderating a panel about marketing -- my experience with BlogHer Book Club has been educational and so much fun for me. I've "met" online two of the three Penguin authors who will be speaking -- Jean Kwok (Girl in Translation) and Ann Napolitano (A Good Hard Look). (Haven't yet met or "met" Dominique%20Browning. Will have that on the docket, for sure.) Look! I even get to be on a panel with Jean.

Track 1: Your Role as Marketer in Today's Publishing World

Writers are–or need to be–marketers, and your command of social media provides a critical edge: both pre-book deal, to validate you have a following, and post-book publication, to help you sell your book. BlogHer editor Rita Arens (editor of Sleep is For the Weak) moderates a discussion with Penguin Business Development Manager Colleen Lindsay, author Jean Kwok (author of Girl in Translation), independent PR consultant Lauren Cerand, and Penguin marketer Lydia Hirt.

I'm also waiting eagerly to see old friends/speakers Kamy Wicoff, Carleen Brice, Jane Schonberger, Kathy Cano-Murillo, and a bunch of other heavy hitters I don't know well yet.

And ... the part I'm most excited about is the small-group mentoring. Here are the topics available:

Seeking fiction agent
- Seeking nonfiction agent
- Seeking help with a book proposal
- Memoir group
- Literary novel group
- Genre novel group (romance/mystery/thriller/scifi, etc.)
- Children’s (YA/middle grade/picture book)
- Humor/novelty (ex: LOLcats/Cake Wrecks, etc.)
- Cookbooks
- Shorter works/anthologies
- Expert platform nonfiction 
- Book blogging

That? Is something that never happens. Except it's happening. Next month. Good Lord, I can't wait. (For those who are wondering, the conference is $199.)

AM GIDDY. PLEASE TO JOIN.

END WRITERLY FREAK-OUT.

FOR NOW.

This week I corresponded with a friend of mine who is writing a memoir. She had some questions, and I had some answers she had to wrap her head around for a day or two. At one point, she wrote something akin to "I thought I was running a 5k, and I got two miles in and realized it was a 10k." I nodded sagely and spent last night working on my own novel for two more hours, two hours added to the hundreds I've spent since I started writing in 2009.

We wrote back and forth a little more, and I told her about my own struggles and time commitments. I told her how I felt when someone asked me at BlogHer '11 if I'd sold the novel I mentioned at BlogHer '10 yet and I had to say no, that I'd thought it was finished but it was so not finished last summer. Not finished at all. I've overhauled it completely since then.

Somewhere along the line, I had to face the -- is it humiliation? Maybe that's too strong a word. But it's an emotion similar to that, the sort of emotion that drops your stomach an inch when it hits you, the sort that brings a flush to your cheeks and a burn to your ears and maybe some frustrated tears to your eyes, whether you want it to or not. It's something akin to humiliation that creative people feel when they talk about their work publicly and then don't immediately succeed in the eyes of the world, in their own eyes even. It's something akin to humiliation that stops many people before they even start.

I faced it pretty hard core that day at BlogHer '11 when I realized I'd talked about this novel at my panel and then had the audacity to show up a year later with no hardcover to sell. There's a balance one must achieve between laziness or fear and hubris in order to query at all. In order to survive rejection, you have to be confident in your writing, in what you're doing. It's a mental game as much as any endurance sport, because you can't win unless you compete and finish, and just finishing alone can feel so insurmountable most days.

I write about my process here because I hear behind the scenes from so many people who think book deals drop out of the sky. Since I started working on Sleep Is for the Weak, I've managed to meet and become friendly with at least twenty published authors, and they all echo back what I emailed my friend this week: It's hard. It's painful. It's worth it. Don't give up.

I've always found the community of writers online to be so tremendously supportive of each other.

At BlogHer '11, Lisa, Elisa and Jory announced a writers conference put on by BlogHer and presented by Penguin in New York City on October 21. I'm going to go. I'm hoping to meet in person a few of those authors who were such an inspiration for me. If you find yourself in that place where you need those emails, you should go, too. But either way -- it's hard, it's painful, it's worth it, don't give up.

I won't, either. Ann Napolitano, one of our current authors, didn't -- it took her six years to write the novel I just read for BlogHer Book Club. And the writing was memorable, exciting and worth every minute, in my opinion.