Wednesday, May 1, 2019

IWSG May

If you're not familiar with 

May. Already. While that's awesome because it's nice to finally see green outside and flowers blooming, it also feels like I'm missing several months from the year and I'm not sure where they went. Maybe they got lost in one of the many snowstorms or the heavy winds blew them away. 

I've been busy promoting Trust at lots of events. As you see, my schedule is pretty full this year. I've already marked a few events to try and some to drop from those I did this year. Keeping a hard copy calendar for this sort of thing has been a sanity saver. Usually all my organization on that front is on my phone calendar, but it's been super helpful to have something I can scribble notes on, plaster sticky notes to and get a good overall view of events I've applied for and those I've been accepted to.

Did you manage to be productive with writing over the winter? I seemed to be on a relative roll until the end of February. It's been about two months since I've reliably used my morning writing time for actual writing. While I have managed to get a couple short stories written and submitted, its mostly been promoting my new book, catching up on sleep (because I wasn't sleeping well for a while there), gathering notes for a few panels I'm speaking on next month, and organizing a couple author events I'm hosting. So productive in general, but not how I prefer to use that time.

This month's questions is: What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?

When I first started writing more seriously, as in trying to learn and get better rather than just spewing out words for fun, I explored fan fiction. This was a great place to get my feet wet with trying different types of storytelling and focusing on different things while romping about in an already established world.

I've always been an action and dialogue first kind of writer. It's adding the feels and details that I have to layer in later that I'm always working on. When I threw this particular short story together, I decided to use a mute character from the cast, which meant I couldn't rely on my old standby of dialogue to carry the story. I had to drop into emotion and body language right on the first draft. It worked. I made people cry.

From that story onward, I've tried to remember and employ the tidbits I learned about getting readers emotionally invested. And to use that power wisely - rather than killing characters left and right for the fun it.  

6 comments:

  1. That is a cool story about you become aware of reaching the reader. I like stories that touch my emotion. Happy IWSG Day https://www.junetakey.com/iwsg-may-1st/

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  2. I keep a real calendar as well as one on my iPad. When promoting a book, you have to!

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    1. Funny how having the hard copy calendar is a different experience than having the same calendar electronically. But it works.

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  3. I don't know much about fan fiction (just what I've learned from my students which is not much), but this may be an avenue I should explore. I'm sure some of my favorite authors have fan fiction out there. Do you have any suggestions as to where to go to write fan fiction?

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    1. Google (your favorite fandom) fanfiction and see where people are posting it. There are a lot of options ranging from large sites that do fan fic of all sorts to small ones that only focus on one particular fandom. But really, you can write fan fic for yourself without ever sharing it online if you'd prefer to just use it for practice. I also wanted to start meeting other writers so that's why I chose to join an online community and post there. It turned out to be a great ground level place to begin networking and learning from others.

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  4. Wow. Your list of where you'll be this year is awesome! I'm happy to say I'll be joining you for a few of those events. You are always so generous sharing the info with our writers' group. Good luck on promoting Trust, an awesome book.

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