Telling your lived experience through your artistic works is a nerve-wracking, panic-inducing idea for some, and this is a wake-up call to aspire for more than your fear’s bounds.
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One of the biggest compliments I received as a ghostwriter was that my characters felt “made for each other”.
Reflecting has got me thinking what that really means, how does someone write a character that feels real. Like a real person, so incomplete that they somehow feel whole.
In order to make the audience root for, ship, or cry for your characters, a writer must make the character feel as if they’re true reflections of our own experiences. Humans connect with stories on a fundamental level, and as writers, we need to build the “persona” of the character based on what we’ve experienced with other people.
So, draw from what you’ve seen and what you know. Draw from your own experiences. It is important to project the world accurately for your audience to be able to relate and connect to it. The polluted, fake world of Phillip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Bladerunner, for you cinephiles) resonates with audiences today because we see how that could become our reality – hone that sentiment in your own works. Use your voice to actually say something.
Be courageous in your perception and retelling of your existence; don’t shy away from the harsh truths and painful emotions. It’s often in our depictions of these circumstances that we shine the brightest. We connect with characters that have gone through pain, who have experienced trouble and turmoil. We relate to these characters because we all understand what it’s like to struggle in some way or another; to suffer is a universal human experience.
So, embrace it. Embrace the hard. Confront the ugly to spool something beautiful out of the benign. To create something daring from the desolate…
Rising from the ashes, that’s what gives us humans good character, after all.
The Pants-ing v. Plotting Debate has always been a point of pleasure versus productivity. In the high-speed world of indie publishing, a career built on solid plotting leaves a lot more time to move on to the next project.
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Let’s be honest, writing a scene with no notes is magical.
It really takes your breathe away when you develop a scene from absolutely nothing, the words just ebbing and flowing from the dialogue to the descriptions. No notes, no cards, no scene plots guiding you along. It reminds the storyteller why they do this.
Because we savor creating.
But success isn’t just about creating.
It’s about cultivating, crafting, and execution.
So how do we balance this as creatives? The push and pull of feeling like we’re boxing ourselves in while wanting to be free and expressive in the moment?
Well, first, we must admit one thing to ourselves: that we are better when we plan.
Scenes have a natural pacing that people look for, and when a scene doesn’t follow it, the readers feel it immediately. It’s why movies like The Room are so notorious — the mix-matched, rushed and stalled pacing where the viewers are lulled into boredom only to be thrashed awake by a strange, gentle inflection of words following an extreme emotional outburst.
Sometimes, when we trust our instincts too much in writing scenes, what we’re left with at the end is not a reflection of reality, but the rushed, half-baked perceptions made between haste and disregard. We end up with characters whose motives make no sense, whose words don’t sound like their own, and whose actions frustrate and confuse readers.
When we have no compass to follow, we walk in fruitless circles, encapsulated within the darkness of the forest we attempt to escape.
That’s why, as artists, we must lean into structure, no matter how much it frustrates us. Only with a map can we make it out with our voice and our message intact.
Without structure our art ceases to be art and becomes only noise.
I won’t go into the beat structures, or the myriad of ways in which to dice up a scene or a story, or an act structure. Frankly, those are all personal decisions you must make for yourself. By repeating the cycle of crafting a story, you will make your own rhythm, your own system, that works best for you. In a later post I will deep dive on my way of crafting a story, but I wish to put my work out first before I start giving away my trade secrets…
This post is simply a call to learn how to reign in your muse – how to give her a target to aim for when she pulls back her bow-string and lets her arrow fly. To not fear structure and to see it as a framework from which to create your story.
Afterall, a painter cannot paint without a canvas, and beans cannot grow without a pole or trellis. Learning to plot is not a way to kill your creativity, but a way to hone your ideas into a cohesive story your readers will love.
By taking off the creative pressure to manifest entire scenes from nothing, you give yourself the space to creatively “freestyle” off of the scenes you’ve plotted. I am not advocating you to meticulously plot every scene (I do meticulously plot every scene, but they still change from time to time to adjust to the story overall) but by plotting out the general structure of your story and the most powerful scenes you give yourself a framework to be freely creative within.
And that’s when your muse will work her most effectively: when she has something to build off of.
Afterall, stories are powerful to humans because we see ourselves within them: we see our life’s journey through the hero’s journey, and see our times of peril and fortune as an overarching story.
When a reader connects with the story you’ve crafted with their own lived experience, that’s when you start entering best-seller territory.
Different Romance Subgenres have different expectations, and not abiding by reader expectations can spell DISASTER for a manuscript.
As a ghostwriter I feel it is my duty to understand reader expectations in and out, and my career relies on that knowledge. Often times my clients are new to the self-publishing realm and don’t really have a firm grasp on how it works as a whole (and they often are paying for courses to walk them through publishing books written by ghostwriters).
To learn all of these tropes has a steep learning curve, as there are integral story beats that follow each trope. For example, you wouldn’t want to read a romance book with a single-father if the child isn’t going to be a key part of bringing the couple together. Likewise, you wouldn’t want to read a romance with a forced-marriage trope if the audience hardly gets to see the awkward moments of flirtation and frustration that comes with being in an arranged marriage.
Working with multiple editors (each client comes with their own freelance editor in tow) has sharpened my knowledge of common romance tropes that are key to the modern romance writing game. However, each subgenre of romance comes with its own rules, bending and molding the old tired trope into something new and daring (or at least fun and exciting). As you can imagine, an arranged marriage trope is going to look a lot different in say 1800’s Regency England v. 2020’s NYC USA. However, there’s still going to be a good amount of overlap when it comes to the emotional expectations the readers have for the trope itself (e.g., family and friend drama surrounding new partner’s arrival as a marriage prospect, the difficulty getting used to being intimate for show ((especially if there’s an enemies to lovers trope included, which often goes hand in hand with arranged marriage)), etc., etc.
Here are five key ways I keep the expectations straight between subgenres that utilize the same tropes.
Know your tropes. Here’s the keys to the castle y’all, because everything in stories comes down to tropes. Story Tropes, by definition, are common or frequently used devices, themes, images, or plot points in a work of art or literature. Think amnesia, secret child, surprise pregnancy, orphan, “the chosen one” … these are all story tropes utilized in almost every genre ranging from westerns to horrors, from romances to mysteries.
Understanding how these tropes play out requires an understanding of how people function and react to situations. A surprise child reveal isn’t going to hit the reader emotionally if there wasn’t a good reason (i.e. danger) to keep the child a secret in the first place, they’re going to start pondering the ethics of keeping children away from their perfectly decent (yet still flawed as we all are) parent.
Know your subgenre (read ALL the books you can). If the story tropes are the keys to the castle, consider the subgenre the castle itself. Subgenres are sub-categories of a main genre, examples being: Regency Romance, Psychological Thriller, Police Procedural Mystery, Zombie Horror.
Understanding the nuances of the sub-genre is integral to writing a story that readers will love. Readers who love Werewolf Shifter Romances, for example, are going to be very annoyed if you don’t understand Alpha/Beta dynamics of packs, as well as heat cycles, transformation, and a whole slew of other details no where to be found in really any other sub-genre of Romance (besides twists and variations in other shifter works such as Dragons, Vampires, etc).
Know your audience. Here’s the third ingredient for success (but clearly, the most important by far) and that’s Audience Expectation. See, most readers of fiction lean towards a handful of specific genres and then a few specific subgenres in those genres; sure, they may go out and read something completely different every once in a while, but everyone has favorites, and voracious readers are no exception.
This means that the new readers to your story have most likely read 20+ other stories very similar to your own, some even featuring the exact same tropes you’ve chosen.
That’s kind of terrifying, isn’t it?
So, in turn, you have to make sure you’re READING AS MANY BOOKS IN YOUR GENRE/SUBGENRE AS POSSIBLE. You need to be aware of what your readers are reading and how those popular books are shaping the market.
The market always moves, and you better move with it, otherwise you’ll be left behind.
Read Reader Reviews As well as reading the most popular books you need to be reading up on the reader reviews of the books you read — or haven’t read, as I also suggest going through the complaints of some of the worst books in your genre to see what readers DON’T like. Reading up on reviews available by readers gives you insight into what the readers, your target audience, are looking for. I often scrap the Romance subs in Reddit looking for what readers are demanding when brainstorming for new stories.
Practice, Practice, PRACTICE!!! The final piece of advice is the same old thing you’ve always been told: if you want to be a great writer you have to WRITE. I advise writing literally as much as possible, some days that’s going to be zero, other days it might be 10,000 words, but getting words on the page, no matter how boring or useless, is always good practice, and practice, as they say, makes perfect.
Most people dream of starting their own businesses and while some are too apprehensive to ever start, others are too willing to jump in feet first without knowing what they’re getting into! Here are five harsh truths I learned in the past two years of being a beginner business owner.
1. This will not replace your full-time job… yet.
This one is for those of you who are still in the 9-5 grind. No, you can’t just immediately jump from a steady, stable income to opening your own business and expect to keep the same pay, it just doesn’t work that way. Instead, what you should be doing is executing a side business that will later become your full-time business. This means if you want to become an independent author, or a freelance ghostwriter or editor, you better be writing/editing/reading/studying in your off hours.
Yes, this is exhausting. I know first hand, as I had been plotting and writing the first book I wrote (and still plan to publish) while simultaneously working overtime at a call center. Honestly, at the time, I knew I wanted to self-publish (self-publishing authors on Youtube were just starting to become a thing, think 2015-2016ish…) but I didn’t know when that would happen or how, but I kept writing because I realized it was making me HAPPIER.
That’s my honest advice: if you’re working full-time because you HAVE to to survive, then just nurture the hobby that will later become the business. Now is not forever, and you have no idea how the work you did as a hobby now will pay you back in the future.
For example, the samples I pulled from that book I wrote as a hobby got me a significant amount of clients, including clients for genres that I wouldn’t have had any other work to apply with otherwise.
2. Baby’s-First-Business mistakes will happen!
Mistakes happen, there’s no way around it. My best advice is to try to mitigate them from COSTING you money. For example, I not only ghostwrite/edit full-time I also run an Etsy Store called Notes of Nature Co where I sell handmade candles (made by yours truly) as well as direct-to-print home-goods that I’ve designed/are in the creative commons.
When I made my first international sale to Ireland I was so excited! I couldn’t believe someone in Ireland was going to be wearing the hoodie with my company’s logo on it, it was so cool!
Then I looked at my business account and realized that the direct-to-print company pulled the money out to create the hoodie before the Etsy payment came through, and it overdrafted my business account costing me $35 in charges!!!!
I was so upset! How could a milestone like this bite me so hard?
Because, I made a baby’s-first-business mistake. I didn’t pay attention to how the direct-to-print company worked with Etsy, and I didn’t give myself the grace to have an extra $500+ rolling in that bank account at least at all times (like I do now).
Being a business owner means making mistakes. My advice is to try to mitigate how COSTLY these mistakes are.
Another Mistake: My LLC’s name.
My husband told me earlier: “You should just drop the Ghostwriting & Editing and just make it Ethereal Quill Co.”
Guess who didn’t listen.
Guess who spent $70 bucks on a DBA just to turn around and spend another $70 to file a proper name change.
There is a reason I have NO business debt for my LLC and I might not ever lol.
3. Everything costs more than you think.
Let’s say you’ve been writing or sewing or painting as a hobby for years, you’ve been doing the market research, you know the websites you’re going to use to work/ the avenues to sell your goods in person, and you’re ready to jump in. Woohoo!
You’ve gone on your state website and filed your business paperwork, but you find that you have to pay extra to be an LLC, something you’ve been advised to do (because it protects your personal assets from your business, essentially, if your LLC gets into financial trouble the creditors are not entitled to anything beyond the business: they cannot go after your home, your car, your personal savings, retirements, or investments. In discussions of lawsuits it’s generally accepted advice that LLC’s protect your personal assets from litigation as well, but there are some circumstances where this is not the case).
Now you see that filing an LLC is nearly twice the price as the Sole Proprietorship, though? What gives?
And when you go to open your business account you realize they want another $100 to establish the account “in good faith” what the fuck?!
And, under the advice of someone with your best interest at heart, they tell you to go to a formal tax professional to file your taxes, as the tax office will certify the authenticity and handle any audits you may receive from the IRS. When you get the bill for that it’s an eye watering $500?!
I am here to tell you the cold hard fact: everything costs more than you think. In budgeting it’s common to pad the budget, and when you’re a business owner there is no truer fact. As I stated above I over-drafted my business account and had to pay 35 bucks extra out of pocket instead of being excited about my first international sale because I didn’t give myself enough padding.
Financial padding helps. You can’t let yourself get caught up in the “oh a new book, oh a new desk, oh a new keyboard”, you need to keep yourself focused on your growth goals and your goal trajectory.
Otherwise, you’ve just given yourself a very expensive hobby.
4. RESEARCH IS REQUIRED BEFORE YOU START.
This is all caps FOR A REASON. You should NEVER be jumping into starting a business without doing the proper research of EVERYTHING that will be necessary including laws, documentation, and proper business practices in your field. You need to understand your state laws, the federal laws and all of the paperwork you’ll be required to file as a business.
This isn’t all the research you need to do though: you need to do market research to know the entire ins-and-outs of the industry you’re about to launch head first into. If you don’t have any business courses under your belt, you might want to consider taking a few to familiarize yourself with how businesses are structured and managed. You might want to take a few courses to get some certifications or credentials under your belt relative to your field (like I did by getting my certification in copyediting). If you’re gunning to be an author, you’ll most certainly want to look at workshops and classes held by authors both independent and traditional to understand the publishing industry as a whole.
All of the research you do pays you back 1000-fold. The more knowledge you have the less likely you are to be caught flat-footed, and that’s worth the missed sleep or groggy mornings.
5. On-going learning is mandatory.
You will never be ahead if you’re not researching, researching, RESEARCHING.
Here’s one last hard line tip for you: THE MARKET NEVER STOPS. You are either ahead of the curve or behind and following along. You need to be plugged into social media (even if you’re just an introverted lurker) because then you can see where the market is shifting and what’s becoming popular.
Jumping on a popular trend before the swell? That’s the ticket to success!
Alexandra Sokoloff’s Stealing Hollywood: Screenwriting Tricks for Authors is easily one of the best plotting books I have ever purchased. It is a vital tool I use for every plot I’ve written since purchasing the book.
Now, Alexandra Sokoloff is notoriously protective of the contents of this book, and because of that I will be disclosing no direct information including quotes, techniques, or really anything. I’m sorry for that, but ask Sarra Cannon of HeartBreathings on YouTube about it…
What I can say about it is that it’s the THICKEST, LARGEST plotting book I own, and it is chock FULL of crucial information, such as popular scene additions and where they go in the first, second, or third act.
She also includes movie/story break downs, examples, and chapters on dialogue, stakes, love stories, fairy tales, villains, creating suspense, plot twists, and so much more!
I heavily suggest this book to any writer. Even for pantsers the information is vital, especially when you are stuck in a writer’s block and don’t know where to head.
Life has been a whirlwind these past three weeks, and I’m sorry for not giving you all a head’s up on what I was doing.
To cut straight to the chase: I had neck surgery and I started freelance ghostwriting romances! I am no longer unemployed, I am SELF EMPLOYED!
Like I said, it’s been wild!
I am recovering well from surgery and I have three clients who I am regularly turning pages into for cash. I am finally a paid writer! All three of them are looking to be long term clients and I am so happy and grateful for them!
I started an LLC for my ghostwriting/editing business, and as soon as I have the official declaration of my business, I’ll be promoting it on this blog 🙂
You can still look forward to my short stories and blog posts (Nightshade and Pomegranate is still getting written, no worries), I’ve just been having a hell of a time juggling everything with three clients who I am trying to impress with my work and consistency!
I am very thankful for my surgery, it was to correct a genetic condition inherited from my grandmother, and it should be the answer to me becoming a mother. Once my calcium regulates naturally, I will be able to start trying again with my husband. I am thrilled and terrified. Losing our first pregnancy last year still chokes me up with tears, and I’m petrified that I’ll experience that loss again. However, I can’t let that fear swallow my life whole.
When I began this blog my goal was always to “soft publish” my short stories here and then submit them for publication before compiling them into a short story compilation. Finding where to submit, how to submit, and when not to submit has become a whirlwind of quick learning. Keeping my muse from burning out has also become quite burdensome.
Submissions is a new realm. When I was in community college there were student journals and papers that were published where students could submit work. My best friend got a work of hers published in it while she was pursuing her AA in English. At the time I was working full time and burning myself out, causing myself to lose financial aid and nix my ability to continue college at that school. Bummer. Due to that burn out I never got the chance to attempt to write anything, let alone submit it.
Currently (but not in the future), my short story titled Dejavu is on this blog in five parts. I will be taking these down soon to polish it up and submit it for publication to Silver Blade Magazine. Fingers crossed, I will get chosen and receive a small cash prize. In the works I just plotted a new short story I will be posting, in parts, on this blog titled Nightshade’s Fate, a retelling of the story of Persephone, the Goddess of the Underworld and the night Hades takes her away. I will be submitting this to Quill & Crow Publishing for their The Damned and the Divine submission call. I’m extremely excited to write this short story.
However, I also feel the siren call of burn out on the horizon. I just finished the first draft of Silver Blood in September, then I finished Dejavu, a short story I started two years ago (and something that had been on my mind for two freaking years!). Now I’m jumping into a new short story. Short stories are, admittedly and obviously, easier than full novels. Short stories can move faster where a full book requires more pacing. Short stories are where clever prose matters most, where every word counts in a tale.
Short stories, like novels, are still work, nonetheless.
My next steps with Silver Blood are to add a B plot to thicken the word count and add more to the world. I’ve wanted to step away from the manuscript for a few weeks to a month (or two, even), so I can come back with fresh eyes and fresh ideas. The short stories I’ve been writing are entirely different than the storyline of Silver Blood, so I’m hoping not to succumb to burnout for too long.
Even if I do burn out, I’ll still be here to tell you about it. Not every part of writing is easy, and now that I’ve been pursuing writing stories as a part-time job to full-time hobby, I recognize that burnouts are cyclical, not a reflection of my inability to become a great writer who has an awesome following. My burnout does not reflect my inability to write well, or to craft stories. My burnout is just a result of pushing myself hard, and when I let my mind rest I allow myself the space to let my muse ponder and give me some ideas.
See you all next week! I will be starting Nightshade’s Fate Wednesday morning!
Juggling work, housework, and leisure is essential to all workers, but especially those working from home or managing a business launch.
I rarely leave the house, it is the reality of my life now that I don’t have a job to go to everyday.
My days as a housewife consist of three main duties: cooking, cleaning, and writing. Once I have a baby life will be thrown into the utter chaos of love, baby feet, and poop, but for now it’s simpler. My husband and I have always had the goal of me being a stay at home wife and once Covid hit I’ll be honest, I wasn’t exactly hitting the pavement trying to get a job in the middle of a pandemic. My husband, through his hard work and conscientiousness received a very big promotion, and he began working overtime weekly as an IT manager, requiring me to manage the house.
This means that all meals and cleaning falls on me, something that I enjoy. I had many jobs as a housekeeper at hotels in my young adult years, and thus I know how to clean a house rather quickly. It’s just getting the motivation to do it, heh. In turn, I try to plan the meals out for the day, as my husband and I are working on getting in better shape before we try for a baby again. Once I have my surgery, I’ll have to wait a month or two for my hormones to stabilize and then I’ll be able to get pregnant and carry a full term baby.
My medical conditions, as well as various other experiences that happened during the year has depleted our emergency savings, and now we’re working to stash it back again. That’s achievable by me cooking basically everything.
My mornings start with coffee and fasting. I fast a lot. Generally, I fast between 16-20 hours a day, only drinking coffee, tea, and water in that time. I avoid carbonated drinks, but I have a soft spot for Truly’s on the weekends. Generally, I’ll bring my husband breakfast between ten and eleven, lunch around two to three, and dinner at six to seven. Then I do the dishes and shower for the night. Twice a week my friends come over to workout the makeshift gym in my basement. We’ll be going on a bachelorette weekend getaway in a month and we plan to look as good as possible!
As for writing, from approximately 9AM to 5PM I’m at the computer trying to write. According to my writing tracker spreadsheet (which I will be uploading for download here at some point) I have averaged 2500 words a day during this manuscript. My highest day was 5600. I hope to hit 10K at some point, but I doubt that will be consistent on a daily basis. Maybe one day. Hopefully. In the early morning I’ll check my social medial pages (as of today I only have a twitter) and post some positive and feel-good content. My goal is to never talk about politics or anything negative; I imagine people are readying dark fantasy romance to ESCAPE reality and to ESCAPE the negativity of the world.
My average writing sprints are 25-55 minutes but I don’t keep a timer, I just try to get myself into flow and don’t stop until I am done with the scene or I get stumped at what should happen. I have a few tricks in my back pocket now if I get stumped, including backing up the previous interaction and sending it into a different, more interesting direction.
I hope in the following weeks to get more a stable schedule with everything in my life. At the very least, I have begun to write and schedule my blog posts, so that I do not just blip off the map for a two year stint again.
Also, I finished my first draft (YAY!) at 45K words. I am working on brainstorming scenes to bring that up to 65K. Then it’s editing and completed! I will keep you all posted on my plotting and editing systems.
See you all Monday!
picture credit: “person holding yellow plastic spray bottle photo” by JESHOOTS, published on unsplash.com
Caught between plans and executions. Also details about my current manuscript.
I’ve been re-reading Jewel Allen’s Rapid Release (attempted to link below) and it’s been inspiring, yet intimidating.
In the writing-craft book, Allen explains how she pens 50,000 words in the span of a week, allowing her to push out romance books on a monthly basis. She writes escapism romance, a niche that is both in demand and fairly simple to write (in terms of research, concepts, etc). She explains how marketing plans will still need to be devised by authors as rapid releasing is only one marketing strategy.
If I were to say my goal, it would be to take dark fantasy/sci fi romance and mimic what Allen is doing with escapism romance. I want to launch long series consisting of books which are about 70,000 words. I am not able to write 50,000 words in a month yet, but on my current manuscript Silver Blood I’ve written over 17,000 words in August alone. That manuscript is at just over 40,000 now.
17,000 isn’t enough, though. Even with this last remaining week in August I’ll need to push myself to write as much as possible to finish my draft before September.
Silver Blood, the working title of my current manuscript, is about a new kind of vampire. Today I will, hopefully, be powering through 5k words to finish the final chapter. Then the rest of the week I will add additional content needed to calm the fast pace of the story in its rawest form. It is a fantasy concept based on an old roleplaying forum board my best friend and I made back in 2002 on a website called avidgamers.com which doesn’t exist anymore. (Back in the heyday of free website hosting for no explicable reason, where I, and many other people, cut teeth on HTML.)
Ultimately, my end of year goal is to: 1) Finish Silver Blood first draft and editing 2) Finish Americana Wasted first draft and editing 3) Finish Americana Wasted 2 first draft and editing 4) Finish Dark Requiem editing
Successfully completing these goals will give me four completed books and set me up with 2 continuing dark fiction series and 1 stand alone series of horror/thriller books which will be released annually in October.
I forgot to mention, I have another manuscript I wrote in the summer of last year. It’s a fantasy about a demon hunter who’s possessed by a grim reaper in exchange for help in executing revenge against the entity that killed his family. It is VERY rough, and at this point I’m holding back on it because this character is going to tie into Silver Blood, just not yet. In my mind they are two protagonists, and their story will begin with Silver Blood and end with the other series. They just haven’t met yet.
That’s about it for today. I have more thoughts about potentially having a second pen name for straight up feel good romances that write easy and sell easier. I just don’t know when I’ll have time for that. If I can juggle two writing projects at once, though them being entirely different (outside of the romance subplot) may actually allow me to pursue something like that. And then, what kind of romances? Contemporary? Regency? Western? Historical? All of them?
I don’t have a real job anymore, so how much can I write until I burn out?
Also, enjoy the rebrand. This blog is gonna be looking different as I decide how to design it. I need to figure out how to get dark fantasy romance across in my site design. So for now you’re getting Mucha flowers!
Jewel Allen’s Rapid Release:
(I tried to link the book from amazon but wordpress blocked it so…. search it on Amazon, it’s definitely worth a read if you’re looking into self-publishing.)
Hey, it’s been a while. A lot has happened. A lot is still happening.
I haven’t returned to work; at this time I am a homemaker and an avid gardener.
My husband and I were working on creating a family. That didn’t go as planned, and unfortunately I was diagnosed with a disease affecting my endocrine system which will require surgery. That surgery is being held up by genetic testing which I can’t get into any earlier than November. I was pregnant the very end of last year, and unfortunately I lost that baby.
When I lost that baby, I lost a very real piece of myself. I lost my ability to be carefree and believe that everything was going to work out. I spiraled into a deep depression, of which I’ve crawled out only recently. Even typing this out now I’m still reduced to a mess of tears; it’s just that I can pull myself back together in a matter of minutes rather than experiencing a revolving panic attack.
That depression had completely wiped my creativity. My muse wasn’t gone, she was just drowning in sorrow with me. Everything felt like it was halted: my dreams of being a mother and my dreams of being an independent author.
Time doesn’t heal, it just numbs, and as of now I’m numb enough to return back to what I was doing before.
I’m currently working on my fourth manuscript, a fantasy romance. I was hesitant to write romance, I am not a rom-com type of gal. I always preferred dramas, horrors, or suspense to romance. However, almost every story has a romance component to it, and I decided that I needed to strengthen my skills. It doesn’t hurt that romance sells the best as well.
The post-apocalypse western is still happening, it’s just that two years later I realize that I need to pull the story down the middle and make two books by changing the climax and making large fundamental changes to the world. Less sci-fi, more western.
The horror story that I believe I had mentioned is also still happening. I just need to revisit the manuscript and polish it up. It is coherent, I just remember feeling as if the story wasn’t actually fleshed out the entire way.
Oh, yeah. I also earned a certification in copywriting from Poynter University. It felt really good to earn that cert.
My big goal is still to stash back 12 books to publish my first year, I’m just now playing with the idea of having two pen names: one for dark/fantasy/horror novels and the other for historical/western/contemporary romance.
I will be consistent. I know that was the mantra of my previous posts but I’m serious. I’m beginning to write a lot faster and I need to amass an audience before I can publish. I need to have people ready to review!
Thank you anyone still here. I did not forget about you. The pangs of guilt from leaving you hanging the last 2.5 years was not lost on me, and I hope that you all made it out of the pandemic.
Ethereal Quill Blog 