Wednesday 7 February 2018

IWSG February 2018

Time once again for the monthly meeting of the Insecure Writer's Support Group, hosted by Alex J. Cavanaugh, which allows writers of all kinds to share their insecurities without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Today's featured co-hosts are Stephen TrempPat GarciaAngela WooldridgeVictoria Marie Lees and Madeline Mora-Summonte!


There is a great question for this month but before I get into that I'd better cover my insecurity. Of course I'm dealing with recent difficult news - thanks for all the well wishes on that - but a longstanding nemesis has also reared its ugly head again: technical issues. Yes, my beleaguered laptop has decided it doesn't want to go further than the startup screen and so I've resorted to borrowing my stepdaughter's machine again for work purposes. This may mean I don't get around to visiting as many of you as I would like over the next little while, so I must ask you to bear with me. I do plan to keep writing.

On that note, let's get on to this month's question: What do you love about the genre you write in must often?

This is definitely an excellent question because it allows us to wax lyrical about the genres we're passionate about. That said, I never set out to write any particular genre. You start out with an idea and then it tends to fall into the nearest available bracket - or you could just invent one - but I've been trending towards speculative fiction lately. That's kind of a broad umbrella term too, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, horror, you name it - so it's nice to have plenty of scope!

But what I love most about this kind of writing is the potential it offers for your imagination. You can create entirely new worlds, filled with fantastic people and races - you're not bound by the restrictions or rules that exist with an Earth-based setting. Research is very important to a real-world setting, and as a former journalist I should probably embrace that, but maybe it's that painstaking attention to detail that gets drilled in that made me run from it. I wouldn't rule out a work that's "closer to home" - I've written plenty of short stories set on Earth (a present day version), that is - but at the moment I'm loving my explorations of distant realities.

Read further IWSG entries here!

Thursday 1 February 2018

Plan for 2018

I'm a bit late with this kind of post on the 1st of February, I know, but I was away at the start of the year and then, as some of you may have seen on the IWSG blog, had some difficult news. I'm trying to keep busy at this time, though. I hadn't actually got far with my edits for part 2 of my trilogy for the past couple of months, having hit a snag with a part that I knew needed a big change (a majority of CP readers agreed on this). I jotted down some notes on it over the festive period, but continued to put it off, unsure whether I could make it work. If I didn't do anything, though, obviously I wasn't going to make any progress.

So yesterday and today I sat down with that problem chapter and hashed out a workaround to the issue. As well as being a patch, I'm hoping it's also something that's going to make the story stronger. I've got a lot of work ahead of me as this will have a knock-on effect on everything going forward - a trickledown effect that will probably turn into a waterfall. I just need to take the plunge.

So in terms of goals for this year, obviously the big one is to get this book out - I was hoping this may be in the spring but may be more like the summer or even autumn. Let's watch this space though. Hopefully I'm over the big stumbling block.

So for writing - go forward with editing a chapter every couple of days. I have also submitted some existing stories to publication markets this year, and I want to continue with that as well as hopefully writing some new stories - perhaps I can dedicate one day a week to this.

Marketing - continue exploring Twitter and Facebook, as well as building up my email newsletter list. I've been seeing some engagement on the social media, so it's something I need to do more consistently. I also want to get my books on some more promotion sites to see if that brings results.

Well, that's about it. I'll have monthly progress updates going ahead. How is 2018 treating you so far?