Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Connie Cockrell. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Connie, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
An interesting question. Part of resilience is natural, something that everyone is born with. Babies demonstrate that all the time. They can’t quite get their fist in their mouth, they can’t stand up right away, they have to make noises before words. Happens daily.
Adults, though, have been trained to be resilient. In childhood, in the teen and young adult years, resilience can be beaten out of a person. A few too many failures, constant critisism, it all piles up to make a person feel a sense of defeat.
I do believe though, that a person can pull that little bit of stubborness out of their depths, to keep trying, to move on to new things, to push through the trials.
I feel I’ve been lucky in that. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve been criticised, I’ve failed more than once. yes, these things sting the ego. On the otherhand, I’ve had enough successes in my life that I realize that I just have to get up, dust myself off, and try to learn from those mistakes, critiques, and failures and start again.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
My background is a little different but not by much. I grew up in the Adirondacks of New York State and graduated high school in 1973. My family wasn’t well off and as the oldest of six children, there wasn’t money available for me to go to college. That’s when I decided to join the Air Force. After graduation I entered the Air Force in October and spent twenty years in the service.
Good things came from that time. I met and married my still husband, had a daughter, lived and traveled all around Europe, and got both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. A fun, productive life.
After I retired, I went back to where I grew up and got a job with a computer operations company and worked for them for over seven years. The year after 9/11, I retired from the company.
I loved being retired. I volunteered for a lot of different things, grew a humongous garden and stocked my freezer and gave produce to the local food bank. After a bit, my husband wanted to get out of the snow belt so we moved to the mountains of Arizona where we are today.
After moving there, our daughter came to live with us and after she made friends with an aspiring young woman author, told me about National Novel Writing Month. I was intrigued. I’d always wanted to write a story and this seemed like a fun way to do it. She loaned me a book, Story Engineering by Larry Brooks, to learn how to write a book and on November 1st, I began. I did finish that story and by January, was enrolled in an on-line course on How to Revise Your Novel by Holly Lisle.
About sixteen months later, I self-published that book. Since then it’s been non-stop learning about the writing craft, marketing, cover design, and so much more.
So far I have about twenty-two books published and several more in various phases of progress. I write in several genres, though I understand that is not helpful in promoting myself as an author. But when a story presents itself to me, It also is intuitive on what genre it’s supposed to be. SciFi and Fantasy are my favorites but I also have a cozy mystery series, a western, a thriller, and a middle grade book about leprechauns and an evil wizard.
New ideas are constant so I keep a notebook in my purse, beside my living room chair, and of course, at my computer desk. I love nothing more than leaping into a new universe to see what it has to offer.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
One skill is my proficiency with the language. From grade school I was good at spelling, sentence structure, and grammer. My love of reading, though, is, ***or is it was***, a huge part of that. I was familiar with how a book or a short story unfolded even if I didn’t know it when I first started writing books. From both of those is having a good vocabulary. Sure, I still need to dig out the thesaurus from time to time, but having a big vocabulary is so helpful.
A second skill is observation. I tend to be an introvert, so watching other people interact is a built in benefit. In one story, I wanted two male friends to have drinks at a bar. I had to understand, that most men wouldn’t be ordering white wine. They also talk differently to each other when in private than when a woman is present. My time in the military where often I was the only woman, let me understand how guys talk to each other as opposed to how they talk to women or when women are present. How do people walk down a busy city street? How do people behave at a train station? How do flowers unfurl? What sound does the wind make as it moves through the treetops? Is it a different sound for different kinds of trees? You see what I mean. There’s a lot out there to see and hear and taste and smell.
Thirdly, the ability to learn. One of the most valuable skills I have is how to learn new things. If you’ve been in the writing business for any amount of time you already know what I mean. How do you write a bio? Do you want to design your own covers? What software do you use for that? When you’re writing local dialect, how far do you take it? You want to add the flavor of a dialect but still want it to be readable and understandable. One example is my SciFi series, Gulliver Station. The station was initially founded by people from Ireland. To keep that flavor I gave the speakers a dialect, using terms like “Boyo”, Irish names, contractions in the dialog. I had a reviewer actually comment on the dialog as good to give the flavor but still readable. Then marketing and advertising. Even as a traditionally published author, you need to know marketing and advertising. The How, Where, When, and Why of those two pactices are a career in themselves.
Even for an experienced author, all of these and so much more can seem overwhelming but just take one thing at a time and do your best. Find local and even on-line writing groups to help you. My first group in the National Novel Writing Month forum, was instrumental in me finding my first class on How to Revise Your Novel. Now I belong to several social media groups and a couple of in-person groups where I can find advice, help, and even editors and proofreaders. Books, of course, and articles, are very helpful and I follow a few authors as well, a few even offer classes.
Don’t be shy, reach out. Authors are the best and nearly every one was in the situation you find yourself in. They’re friendly and very understanding and willing to help new authors move forward.
If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?
So given everything I’ve said so far, I must be all set, right? Not so. At present, my biggest challenge is burn out. I did write a lot of books very quickly. But when Covid hit and we were in lock down, my first thought was that now I’d have plenty of time to revise the books I’d already written, finish the series was was nearly done with, and work on my advertising and marketing.
None of that happened. I did start a couple of on-line classes. Some really good ones, but I just drifted away from them. It all just felt like too much pressure. So all of those stories, more than seven of them to be honest, plus ideas for others, just sit on my hard drive, making me feel guilty.
Sure, I know what to do. One thing at a time. I know myself enough to understand that I’m feeling overwhelmed and when that happens, I start pushing back. I just need to pick one of the projects, re-familiarize myself with it, and get it done. That rush of feel good feelings of accomplishing something will get me over to the next project, then the next and next.
First, though, I have to drop all of the extraneous things I’ve picked up and been doing. Writing, editing, marketing, all take time. If I want to move forward again with my writing, I need to untangle myself from all of the other volunteering and time wasting things I’ve picked up over the last three or four years. I’ve acutally begun that process and in a few months, I’ll have some, at least, of my writing time back. Wish me luck!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.conniesrandomthoughts.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ConniesRandomThoughts
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connie-cockrell-a2b32315/
Image Credits
Connie Cockrell, Randy Cockrell
