April Author Updates

Today is story time! I will take you back to the first novel I started to write and what I’ve learned since then. Would I finish the story and publish it? Read more to find out! I’m also talking about what I did in March and plans for April. Here’s my April Author Update including a question of the month from the IWSG.

What I am:

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• Reading: I’m rotating between six books. See below.
• Drinking: London Fog Tea
• Watching: Star Trek Picard
• Playing: Mass Effect

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April is National Poetry Month, so I’m outlining a poem a day even if I’m not completing the full verse. April is also a Read for St. Jude charity event so I’m reading for 30 minutes a day and posting about it. I like to rotate between physical, eBooks, and audio so for this month here are my current reads.

I’m also marketing my novel on every social media platform I can find as I’m less than two months away from release! Check out the preorder goodies campaign!

Also in March, I published three poems on my experiences with motherhood in the book Mothers from Poetry Society of Indiana.

IWSG April 2023 Author Update

It’s a IWSG Wednesday (what’s that? read on!) and the question posed this month is about an author’s first book.

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IWSG Question of the Month

Do you remember writing your first book? What were your thoughts about a career path on writing? Where are you now and how is it working out for you? If you’re at the start of the journey, what are your goals?

I started writing my first book in High School. Heavily influenced by JRR Tolkien as the first Lord of the Rings movie was about to release. I made my own Elvish language, drew a map, and had a binder full of character bios, world history, and location descriptions. But I only ever wrote a handful of chapters. I didn’t know how to put together a full story and instead shifted my focus to writing collaboratively. I’ve apparently always enjoyed writing with others to create a story (flash foward now to my coauthored book). I took over a message board from a friend at the time and put in all of my backstory and locations to the site, and then people would create characters in that world and role-play through taking turns posting their writing which ranged from a paragraph to many paragraphs. But because I was running that site (and role-playing as about ten different characters) I never wrote anything specific for the book. It was fun, but eventually got overwhelming as I moved on to grad school and working life and I had to shut down the site. Maybe one day I’ll get back to that world and craft a full novel. I knew nothing about writing as a career that long ago. It was just something I did that I enjoyed.

The second book I started writing was my first blending of sci-fi with fantasy. Sorceresses and AI computers in castles. I started writing this one in college. I actually reread the beginning of it recently and I’m glad to say that the premise still excites me. I’ve learned a lot over the last ten years of writing, and I know I can quickly take what I had written and edit it to my current writing ability. I was expecting it to be bad but…I found myself really enjoying what I had written over ten years ago! It has a solid foundation of characters and worldbuilding. This one is on my list to finish after a few other projects. It’s working title is the Savage Sorceress.

What about that writing career? I had been doing writing for fun, submitting poetry to school magazines being the furthest I had tried to get my work published. And somewhere in the mix someone told me that my writing was a waste time. If this ever happens to you…

Don’t listen.

Eventually I met my now friend and coauthor, and it was our relationship and deciding that we wanted to write together which pushed me into seriously thinking about publishing. And here we are, less than two months away from releasing what is a fusing of fantasy and sci-fi in an epic journey of six POVs. I’ve written more short stories and poems in the last two years than my whole writing career. I feel like I’m finally beating back some of the clouds that say “you’re not good enough” that would have stopped me in the past. Will I ever get to be a full-time writer? If enough of you buy my books, maybe! Until then, I’ll keep writing short stories, novels, novellas, and poetry as time allows. Because I have so many to share with you.