Home Posts tagged "writing" (Page 2)

Tag: writing

It’s Alive!!

…And no, I’m not talking about Frankenstein. Although I could draw some very interesting parallels — stay with me, here. Okay, so let me start from the beginning. Every January (or in the case of this year, February because reasons), I pick a languishing novel out of my pile to start the new year off with. I don’t actually continue working on it, but I give it a bit of time, just to keep it in the background of my mind, refill the well, remind myself that it still exists, and experience the magic again. It’s tradition. Currently, I have three such novels. So I wanted to work on a different one from last year, so I chose Survivor, my oldest work to date. For those of you just joining the madness, Survivor is a psychological thriller/horror novel I started way back in 2004 for a two-year novel writing class I was taking at the time. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It ended up being one of the best books I’ve ever written — and the most maddening, for a variety of reasons. But I love it, believe in it, and this book haunts me. YES. So the goal is to get it published, naturally…except…um…it needs a major rewrite because 2004!Erin just wasn’t as good a writer as 2023!Erin. And well, the book’s in pieces, and — (Frankenstein reference, anyone?) well, it’s been majorly intimidating me for years, but…in 2019 or so, I decided that…

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Why Does My Brain Hate Productivity?

Howdy, friends! How’s the new year treating you? We’re supposed to have a massive snowstorm starting tonight, so that’s fun, she said sarcastically. I think I told you guys this at some point, but at the end of 2021 I sat down with myself and had a heart to heart about what I was doing with my life, and I came out of that knowing that a lot of the things I’ve been working on for the last decade have been to either avoid or to justify a story I’ve been working on for literally ever. (Decades.) Because it’s scary, to put something you’ve put a lot of time and heart into, in case it fails. Because sometimes it’s hard to separate what you create from yourself, and if something you worked really hard on does badly, you can take it as a reflection of yourself. Anyway. I have, traditionally, set many different goals, normally on a monthly basis. Writing goals, drawing goals, reading goals, video game goals, workout goals. We’re talking, like, twenty goals per month. But what I’ve found, recently, is that I do these other goals instead of working on the above story, because hey, I’m being productive still! But I’m also still avoiding the main thing for the same reasons. So, for January 2023, I set just a single goal: work on my revision. Surely putting all my focus onto my main goal would make me do it, right? Well. I mean, I am working on…

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The Birth of a Story

I’ve just turned in the story that will become TDP’s next long work for sale, so I thought it might be fun to go back through some of the steps I took getting here. (Good luck trying to replicate them, though! The process of story inspiration is anything but linear, at least if you’re like me.) A few years before the pandemic, I was generating story ideas by looking at calls for submission from themed short-story anthologies. How those work is that an editor and a publisher collaborate to come up with a theme, often they’ll tap a few better-known authors to headline the anthology, and then they’ll put out a call to fill the rest of the slots. I wrote and submitted a few stories that way. More often, I wrote lots of notes about potential stories, but they needed more time to percolate, so they didn’t get finished in time for the anthology deadlines. That’s okay because most anthology themes aren’t so specific that the story would work only there and nowhere else (and if they are that specific, I don’t write for them, for exactly that reason). This story was one of those that needed to percolate. As often happens, I had an image in my head and a nameless feeling that came with it, but no plot, no character, nothing I could dig into to make it a story. Then the pandemonium arrived and, well, not much writing happened for a while. In the meantime, the…

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Gratitude

Sometimes, in the hustle and bustle of daily life, we forget to stop and give thanks for our blessings. I know I do. Frequently. It’s easy to take for granted that we’re healthy, or that we’ve got food to eat, or a roof over our heads. We forget that there are people out there who don’t have those things. And then it’s like, whoa, I am so lucky. I need to thank God/the Universe/whomever for this. Every Thanksgiving I try my best to practice gratitude. At our table, we list our blessings and what we are thankful for. It’s a small but very powerful thing. It reminds us that we should never take anything for granted. As you know, my health has never been perfect. But I am very lucky in that I’ve never had cancer or any other serious or life-threatening illness. I’ve never had to think about what happens after I’m gone in a very real way (versus abstractly right now) or actually make preparations for that possibility or say goodbyes or be faced with options that will either give me three great months or seven horrible ones. I thank God for that all the time. Yeah, I get frustrated with things — the severe fatigue, the sleep issues, the little stuff that pops up…but nothing’s killing me. I’m lucky. So damn lucky. I’m also grateful for my business, my job, which allows me to work from home and not jeopardize my health worse by having to work…

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Playing Catch Up

Hi friends! Like Siri, I too love autumn (and am an autumn baby), and October is my very favorite month of the year! I just…feel very exhausted this October. It’s hard work, getting a book ready and then out! I’ve essentially done almost nothing but Hallowed Hill since, oh, May? June? Goodness, I don’t even remember. But I had to get the book ready, and then I needed to do marketing, and publishing, etc., and it was A LOT. And now the book is out! And aside from generally poking it (and fighting with Amazon, which keeps losing bits of things) it doesn’t require a lot of my attention anymore. So now I can move on to all the other stuff I should have been working on, right? I mean, in theory. But generally I am just tired. MileHiCon is this month, which I’ve been doing for, oh, eight years or so. I’ve got copies of Hallowed Hill ordered, and I’ve submitted my permits and have my panel schedule and all that jazz, but there’s still stuff to do. I need to figure out a card reader, and do panel research (maybe–I’ve already forgotten what panels I’m on. I had to drop the dinosaur panel which was devastating), and I’m pondering maybe making little booklets with the excerpt, or the first chapter, in them to hook people into buying the book. Or maybe I’ll just do bookmarks. But I’ve got to figure that out. And I’ve got a big volunteer…

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Announcement: Making Some Tweaks at TDP

Hello readers and loyal fans! You’re getting a bonus blog post from me this month because we’ve got some adjustments to tell you about. As you may have noticed, the last few years have been…kind of a lot, as the kids say. Here at TDP, the four of us are writers, but outside of TDP we also have families, health challenges, and day jobs to juggle, on top of, well… *gestures to the world at large* So we’re pulling back on the monthly free content. Instead of a yearly output of 10 freebies (short stories, serial installments, poetry), we’re moving to 4 freebies. The weekly blog posts will stay the same. We’ve been putting out 2 longer works (novels or anthologies) for sale each year; we plan to maintain that schedule or even increase it if we can. That may mean you’ll see a range of lengths, not only full-length novels. We’ll indicate the length (novel, novella, etc.) on the marketing copy for each so that you’ll know what you’re getting, and they’ll be priced accordingly. We’re excited about these changes. Some of us shine the most as writers with stories that have more space to breathe, and we’ll be able to focus on the kind of storytelling we love best. We’ve been writing more serials lately, and now we’ll be able to explore those middle lengths even more, which in turn opens up more storytelling possibilities. And in general, writers do their best work when they’re not scrambling for…

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Why Perfectionism Sucks

About a week ago, I read an awesome poem on Instagram. I follow a lot of poets on there, and I collect prompts and post my own stuff and generally try to participate in the poetry community when I can. Anyway, this poem inspired me, and I commented to the poet that I “might write an after poem inspired by it.” (An “after poem” is basically that — a poem inspired by another poem, or a response to it). The poet was obviously excited and happy to read that because she said, “Please, please do!” So I did. The poem was on “All the Places I’ve Lost Myself.” But my version didn’t quite hit the mark; in fact, I believe I veered completely off course. As one does. Oops? I wasn’t happy with it. Well, it wasn’t bad per se. It just wasn’t what I was hoping for as an after poem. If you recall, these Instagram poems are part of my Bad Poetry Project, so they don’t have to be perfect. But all of a sudden, the perfectionism monster reared its ugly head. One revision, I told myself. Just to get it right. I had some better ideas. I was sure I could nail it. And…I almost did? But not quite. Not quite. Now, here’s the problem. I am a total perfectionist. I know this about myself. I’m not allowed to make mistakes, not allowed to be anything less than 100% perfect. Why? I suspect trauma — being bullied,…

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When I’m Not Writing I’m…Thinking About Art

So, due to some health stuff, writing has had to take a back burner and it totally sucks. I expect this to be temporary, and I fully plan on being back at it as soon as my fingers can get typing. But in the meantime, I’ve been doing some serious contemplation about art. Specifically, Tarot and Lenormand decks. For those who don’t know, I started on a dog deck for my sister about twenty-five years ago but never finished it. So that’s on my list of things to do. I’d like to expand the subjects to include other dogs and our cat, Hailey, as the only subject at the time was our dog, Emmy, who is of course now deceased. So that’s a thing. But lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about life in general and healing, affirmations, self-care, and other self-empowering type stuff. I just turned forty-six last month, and it dawned on me that I could use a bit of healing, being that I had been bullied and made fun of as a child and was in an abusive marriage. And I thought a healing/self-empowerment type Tarot deck would be so cool. There are so many out there, you can’t even believe. Kickstarter is literally my Kryptonite — I got turned on to it last year and went on a bit of a backing spree on Tarot decks. Of course I stopped before things got out of hand, and I backed them with the idea that…

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Writing Through a Pandemic, Two Years In

It’s been just over two years since we learned the phrase “social distancing”. A lot of the writers I know have been struggling. Turns out it’s hard to be creative when there’s bone-deep uncertainty washing away at your foundations. Related: the romantic myth of the writer in a garret. It’s also hard to be creative when you’re scrambling to fulfill basic needs like housing or taking care of your health and/or loved ones…even without a pandemic on top of that. (Here we give a nod to musicians, many of whom have been determinedly putting up livestreams and online concerts while their main source of income was cut off. Those have been a huge source of comfort to me, and I hope to the various musicians as well.) I’ve had plenty of creative struggles, too, during this time. I barely wrote at all in 2020, although I did manage two installments of my clockpunk serial (I’ll get back to that one day, I swear!) and a few thousand words during NaNoWriMo. During most of 2021, I could only write short pieces that all confronted the state of the world head-on, from pandemic-themed poetry to flash fiction. (We won’t talk about the short story I started in 2019, set at the Olympics during…a pandemic. Oops?) Then came NaNoWriMo 2021. I’ve talked before about how I made my secret stretch goal of 10,000 words on my unashamedly escapist feminist fantasy WIP. It felt really good. I had energy again for a few months.…

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I Can Procrastinate Forever

Howdy, friends. (How goes the Encanto thing, you might ask. Well, we watched it again tonight, so, uh, good?) Last fall, frustrated with how my year was going and how I was not getting anything I’d planned done, I sat down to look at my writing goals and do some soul searching. And I came to the realization that everything I’d been doing–for years–was avoiding my main goal, which is to see a high fantasy trilogy I’ve been working on for over half my life in print. It was awful. I felt like I’d been wasting my life. And I understand why. I’ve put so much time into this one story, over so many years, that the idea of it being rejected, or not doing well, is almost paralyzing. But, anyway, long story short, I came to this realization and so set a goal for this year of seeing the first book revised so help me God. But. There’s always a but. At the time I came to the realization, I was in the middle of another draft. So, of course, it made sense to finish that first. Then I needed a novella to submit here, so that had to be done, and now there’s an anthology that needs working on, and you know, deadlines and so forth… It is a problem. But at least I can see that now, and understand my own motivations even if they are stupid. I’m telling you this, friends, so you can keep me…

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