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.
Featured Candle: Maple Butterscotch Handmade Candles, Prints, Clothing, and More available at my Etsy Store, Notes of Nature Co:NotesofNatureCo.Etsy.Com
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.
Prints, Clothing, and More available at my Etsy Store, Notes of Nature Co:NotesofNatureCo.Etsy.Com
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.
It became impossible to work on my own literary projects when swamped with commission work for clients. Here’s the three big reasons I quit ghostwriting and a peek and what I’ll be doing going forward.
Prints, Clothing, and More available at my Etsy Store, Notes of Nature Co: NotesofNatureCo.Etsy.Com
If you’ve been here a while, you know a few things about me…
1) I’m pessimistic. (Or, at least more realistic than optimistic). 2) I’m inconsistent with blog posts. 3) I’m pulling myself in a lot of directions at once.
In my daily life I struggle with three main things when it comes to managing time…
I HATE losing spontaneity in my creative ventures.
I tend to follow my heart and not my head when it comes to what I manage to get completed.
My husband relies on me for all domestic duties because he’s constantly on-call for his job and he “brings home the bacon”, per se.
To no one’s surprise, taking on ghostwriting only dwindled my capability to be creative even further.
And at times, I felt like I was wringing my internal muse out like a rag — squeezing the last little bit of creativity clean out of her to hand to someone else.
So, in the interest of transparency, here’s the main three reasons why I’ve said goodbye to ghostwriting, (despite my clients begging me to stay).
#1 My Writing Outgrew My Clients
I began ghostwriting as a way to get my feet wet in the writing industry. I was warned by a few writers that I was selling myself short by giving away my work for someone else to publish, but I didn’t see it that way.
I saw ghostwriting as a paid internship, and I still encourage other people considering getting into ghostwriting to do so! I learned so many things about how stories are written, how tropes are expected to be handled in stories and how to create tight, psychologically sound love stories that are exciting and fun for readers!
Still, I learned a lot of hard lessons too, including how to tell when I’m working with someone who wants me to “dumb down” my work, or someone who wants me to write pure smut under the guise of “romance”. I started to feel like I was required to be a robot, to completely strip my voice from my work, and on top of that, there were times where I would come up with something really beautiful and have to sell it away…
When I started ghostwriting back in September 2022 the idea that AI was about to sweep the international workforce was unheard of, but now, we all see the reality. With the introduction of AI, people who are not the best at crafting stories (or even, the best at having a rudimentary understanding of the English language) are now able to crank out manuscripts at lightning speed in perfect English, while the story maybe lacking entirely.
I can’t tell you all how many manuscripts I edited that had “4o” at the end of each chapter…
At the same time as this AI influx occurred, there was a mass influx of new “ghostwriters” taking contracts for the lowest of rates, which drove down the overall rates of the contracts entirely. No longer could you write a book for 2, even 3 cents per word — nearly all contracts at this time are 1 cent per word or less!
For the quality I put out, it started to feel like I was giving away my work for free…
#3 I Realized It Was Time To Move On To Publishing My Own Work
I really loved my last client.
He’s a great guy, someone who really loved the work I put out and was consistent with payments.
He was also the first client I had to show me the reviews the romances I had written for him were getting…
All the consistent 5/5 star reviews… Reviews from readers beaming over the storytelling, the characters…
It was after a handful of these reviews that I looked through my dusty stack of ideas and notebooks — the internal bibles of my extensive storylines that I had put on hold back in 2022 when I began ghostwriting in the first place…
And I realized in that moment that I had achieved what I had set out to do. I proved myself capable of writing 5/5 star books. I had proven that I could write multiple books at a time. That I could write over 15 manuscripts in a year’s time…
And it was in this moment that I decided to put myself first again.
I promptly closed out my last contract, sent out the files that I had been dragging my feet on to send to him, and told him that I was stepping away from ghostwriting for good. He’s still messaging me to come back, but I don’t have it in my heart anymore…
I want to write for me again.
I am still so grateful to myself for taking this on. Ghostwriting the last three years has given me perspective and understanding beyond any “how-to-write” book could’ve. Every manuscript I wrote for a client went to at least one editor, and the vast majority of replies were lessons in what not to do with certain genres, so much so that when I began writing manuscripts so clean the editors had no remarks, it was another sign I was ready for more.
Now I’m excited to take the knowledge I’ve gained and move forward with my own projects!
And I plan to document the entire plan and launch here, for you all to see.
To the people who have been here since the beginning, I can’t tell you what your patronage means to me. The fact you even come and visit my blog at all… it makes me so happy I want to cry.
Fall seems to be my season of change. Let’s see what comes this year!
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!
I’ve had some people tell me that I’m being taken advantage of as a writer by ghostwriting for cash, but I see it as honest work, almost like a paid internship.
I had this blog post drafted nearly two years ago, but at the time I knew I hadn’t worked long enough as a ghostwriter to be able to discuss it appropriately; I hadn’t paid my dues, in a sense.
Now that I’ve been doing ghostwriting for over two years, I feel I can give some insight into entering a freelance career as a former “nine-to-fiver”.
I lost my Administrative Assistant job at a small company that did union benefits back in March of 2020. I was not upset over this (in truth I was giddy) because I had already seen multiple integral employees of the small office find new jobs, and rumors had been circulating that the office wasn’t going to be open much longer. At the same time the earliest reports of COVID spreading through China had been all over the US news for the past three months; everyone was getting pretty nervous that it was going to jump the Pacific and come to America, and no joke, the morning I was let go was the morning I awoke to news that COVID had spread to the US and that people in hospitals had tested positive.
Before working at that little office I had never gone longer than a month without working, working at a student loan call center for nearly six years beforehand and doing consistent retail work before that.
Getting let go from that little office for really no reason outside of them finding someone cheaper to do my job allowed me to stay home and collect the unemployment I had been paying into for over ten years while the world seemed to fall apart.
I spent that year and a half on unemployment earning my certificate in Copy Editing from ACES and Poynter while also writing three more manuscripts; bringing my total of manuscripts up to five. These are the books I’ve been holding on to, waiting to polish and publish under my own pen names, one of them being Anastasia Frost.
It was when I was notified that unemployment was ending that I began to look into freelance editing and ghostwriting. The consistent payouts from my unemployment was more than I’d be able to make initially while just starting out, so, I held back until it ended to begin. I did research, though, I researched the best freelance websites, and began taking scenes from the manuscripts I had written to create samples to send to jobs.
Admittedly, breaking into my first client was the most difficult aspect; the ghostwriting field is competitive and the editing sphere even more so; we’re talking 20-50 applicants per job at times. One must hone their craft by reading writing books and learning how to create characters and stories so they don’t receive constant rejects, or worst, get a job over their head and make a fool of themselves. Reviews are king; and having good reviews is what brings in new clients.
If a freelance career is began with a one-star rating, one may as well give up entirely.
My first client was a sweet girl who had an entire story written but wasn’t comfortable writing the sex scene and needed the ending finished up. I wrote the scenes for her and she gave me my first rating: a perfect five out five with a glowing review.
That review has been responsible for every other contract I’ve sealed. That’s not to say I haven’t had a less than stellar review; I have (and I’ll explain that in another post), but I feel for certain that had it been subpar, I wouldn’t have had as much work as I have.
Consistency, is key, though, and so to maintain getting new work I need to maintain stellar reviews going forward.
Transitioning to freelance work has given me the freedom and liberty that I never had at any other job; no longer do I have a boss attempting to micromanage my every move.
Not everything is greener on the other side, however, as my fears of being fired for not doing my job have been replaced with fears that I’ll be seen as a failure and a loser if I don’t succeed as a freelancer.
After all, success as a freelancer is directly relative to the person themselves. There is no boss to blame, no co-workers. Your work speaks for you, and if it’s not good enough, you’re not good enough.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to roll and show your belly all the time. I’ll be documenting the ins and outs of all clients, including how to politely tell a client to fuck off; like I had to very early in my freelancing career.
Indie Authors who have an arsenal of tools and experience in their back pockets can utilize open source programs instead of resorting to spending $$$ on popular programs, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite.
Hope you all had a good holiday weekend! My husband and I spent the weekend together enjoying quality time, something that we both needed dearly.
Today I want to tell you all about Open Source software and give you a few suggestions of programs that I use as a writer and graphic designer.
Per, wikipedia (lol yes, wiki, because it had the most straight forward definition of what OSS is): “Open-source software is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner.”
In short: they are free (depends on the program but I will only be suggesting those that are free) software alternatives to some of your favorite programs such as MS Office Suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, In-Design, and so many more.
No longer do you have to pine over whether you can justify a monthly expense just to make a book cover. No longer do you have to deal with MS Word constantly telling you it needs a product key. You can just do it for free, because others who can code also wanted to do it for free. The catch is that there is a learning curve to these programs, as copying a published program line for line would be copyright infringement at the minimum. The programs I will discuss can do all the functions of their more pricey, well known counterparts, it’s just the mechanics of how to do that (buttons, drop down menus, etc.,) will be different from their pricey counterparts as well.
Now, like explained above, not all OSS programs are free, as there are innumerable OSS programs in existence and more being coded every day. Here is a list of my favorite FREE programs.
1) LIBRE OFFICE
Libre Office is a free OSS version of Microsoft Office which includes a comparable program for each of MS’s programs. As a writer, my most used Libre Office program is Libre Writer, basically an exact replica of MS Word. My second most used program would be Libre Calc, their replica of MS Excel. I used Libre Calc to make my writing tracker, something that I use daily when writing to track my word counts, projects, quarterly goals, and progress.
2) GIMP (GNU IMAGE MANIPULATION PROGRAM)
GIMP was a program that was introduced to me back in 2008 by someone who wanted me to stop using my cracked version of Photoshop CS3, something that I was unwilling to do at the time. By the time I was 17 I had spent so much time in Photoshop (CS and CS2 before) that I knew exactly what tools I needed and how to work their functions. Attempting to translate that knowledge over to GIMP, a very similar, and yet, different program proved too tedious for my underage self, and eventually the computer that had that copy of CS3 died, killing my cracked version with it.
Now that Photoshop is behind a paywall and I’m an adult fully capable of being prosecuted by the fullest extent of the law, GIMP has become my program of choice for graphic design. It has the same functions as PS, and you can even upload PS brushes in GIMP for use! Just be aware of the steep learning curve with how the tools function, Luckily, there are a TON of resources online about GIMP and its tools, and how to use them achieve whatever you need. I will admit, there are times where GIMP lags, but I had that problem with PS. I’ve never had a graphics project ruined or had GIMP crash on me in the middle of a design. I am also VERY aware of how many individual layers I have, and I work to compress them as I go. Remember, be patient in getting GIMP to be your gimp (lol, I couldn’t help it I had to).
3) INKSCAPE
Inkscape is a vector graphic design program, the equivalent of Adobe Illustrator. Admittedly, this is not a program that I use at all, just because my projects haven’t required vector work. However, anyone with an eye for marketing can see the vector trend running rough shot over the entirety of the contemporary romance and YA cover styles at this time, and if these are your genres and you’ve considered doing your own cover, this is the program for you!
I am including this program in my review as it was suggested to me by a friend who does graphic design work with vectors, she had nothing but GLOWING reviews about this program and the sample work she showed me came out really great!
Keep an eye out for the next installment of Dejavu tomorrow! Hope you all have a blessed day and thank you for reading!
Goals for the rest of the week and my thoughts on James Scott Bell’s The Last Fifty Pages.
The past week I celebrated completing the first draft of my dark fantasy romance book Silver Blood. Now it’s on to writing additional scenes for pacing.
Finishing my fourth manuscript felt a little surreal. It’s the first completed manuscript of 2022, and as happy as I am with the draft, sadly, nothing feels good enough when it comes to self-publishing. It’s definitely the most clean of my manuscripts, requiring only minor additional scenes and no major changes to the plot, but I still can’t help but feel like I’m behind the 8-ball. Always behind.
The newest addition to my writing book collection is James Scott Bell’s The Last Fifty Pages, a book very pertinent to my current project. James’s books are very straight forward, a major plus of his craft books because he doesn’t waste time (or pages) being overly verbose; he just tells you exactly what to do. That isn’t to say that you can’t be creative; the entire purpose of writing is to be creative, right? The succinctness of his style just means you’ll be on to writing your manuscript that much quicker. This book is marketed as a writer’s guide to perfect endings, and I hope to utilize the advice in my own revisions.
I’ve made a list of about 19 scenes to add to Silver Blood. If I can write 1,000 words for each scene, that will be 19K words added, bumping me up to (hopefully) 65K words. Then it’s just line edits and proofreading.
Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for a special announcement! Thank you, each and everyone of you, for reading my blog! I promise, I am not going to keep you guys hanging!
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.)
Ethereal Quill Blog 