I’m a week
away from the four month anniversary of Blood
Shadows’ birth. What will I be doing to celebrate this momentous occasion?
Probably writing. I’m closing in on the end of the new chapters I’m adding to
the beginning and once they’re complete, I’m going into revisions and diving
back into work on “Shadows Past”, the novella I mentioned in previous blogs. I
figure for “Shadows Past” I’ll spend this month and next month writing it, and
then November to revise and tighten it up, and finish it all up in December.
Maybe by January I’ll have something uploaded to Kindle for your consumption,
my lovelies. That only took six months from conception of the idea to publish
something to Kindle to it actually getting there. Gimme a break, I’m still
learning.
Lately, I’ve
looked at some blogs, articles, and graphics about writing and thought “Tell me
something I don’t know.” At this point in the game, I know that it takes
determination and discipline. I understand the importance of social media. I
recognize the tug of war currently going on between independent publishing and
traditional publishers. I know all of this. I live and breathe it day in and
day out because this is what I do. I’m a writer. And still I follow other
writers and writing resources on Twitter and on Facebook. Because the truth is,
writing is not a science. It’s an art form and though we perfect our style, it
changes as we do. It evolves as we do. And there will always be people who do
not like what you do, who think you could improve what you do. They are the
challenge to always up your game, to not rest on your laurels.
In the past
month or so, I’ve taken to writing reviews on Goodreads when I finish up a
book. For the book I just finished, I wrote the kind of review that might have
upset me if it had been for my book. I think the author has been at this a long
time and she’s well established but the story did not click with me fast enough
to distract me from the fact that I didn’t like how she wrote. And I mean no
disrespect to her at all. I loved her concept, but I found the execution
lacking. By all counts, I’m a newbie who should just keep her mouth shut. But
that’s not how writing works.
I’ll have
people criticize my work, and that probably includes people who I would write
off as know-nothings. So many writers touch on this in their blogs and posts
that we cannot take the bad reviews personally. We are expected to behave with
a certain professionalism and if we’re honest about it, we have to take the bad
with the good. As a writer, though it stings, I have to learn from what I did
wrong in this piece so the next one is totally rocking the words.
Every day
magic lies in the story that sweeps us off our feet so fast that we’re blissfully
unaware of its structural flaws. For me, Fifty
Shades was like that. The entire trilogy had me so caught up in the story I
saw unfolding in my mind, that I was completely unaware of the almost
adolescent writing. I even wrote a blog post defending it. Maybe that’s where
Twilight fans get off saying Bella is so great. It kills me to admit that…
My dad
keeps reminding me that I have to crawl before I can walk, that a college
degree doesn’t guarantee I’ll jump up and take off running. Someone else said
the same words to me last week and the echo struck me. Maybe it’s a universal
truth that at every stage in life, we have to learn how to walk, how to hold
our balance until we can feel the wind whipping through our hair as we rush
towards our future.
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