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The importance of being influenced (#IWSG)
The word, influencer, makes most of us think of self-absorbed wannabe celebrities sharing their carefully-curated lives on Instagram or Tik Tok. (Nice work if you can get it, I suppose.) But we all have influencers. From the time we’re born, the people in our lives shape us in all kinds of ways. One of the things I find both fascinating and terrifying is how a stray remark, a quick interaction, can have a profound effect on another human being. None of us fully understands the power we have over others just by going about our daily business. I’ve written on here a few times about how I got a late…
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When to start a writing career? The second best time is now (#IWSG)
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” Chinese proverb This post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group monthly blog hop, co-hosted this month by Erika Beebe, Olga Godim, Sandra Cox, Sarah Foster, and Chemist Ken. This month’s optional question is: What’s the one thing about your writing career you regret the most? Were you able to overcome it? Before I get to this month’s question, I want to share some exciting news with my IWSG friends (and anyone else who missed my announcement last week): I’ve published another short story! It’s a Christmas horror story, published in this year’s Deathlehem anthology, The Colour…
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November: A month of stress and delight in writing (#IWSG)
I just finished NaNoWriMo. For you non-writers (a/k/a normal people) out there, NaNoWriMo, affectionately known as NaNo, is National Novel-Writing Month, a worldwide phenomenon in which millions of writers try to write 50,000 words in the month of November. Free investment tip: buy stock in coffee companies before November. Alcohol and cigarette companies too. But I digress. A subgroup of NaNo participants are known as NaNo Rebels. We bust our butts all month like the “regular” NaNos, but we do something other than write 50K words of a brand-new novel. In my case, I committed to spending as much time revising a previous NaNo project as it would have taken…
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Blurbs, pitches, loglines, and other book marketing necessities I suck at (#IWSG)
For those of you who aren’t masochists don’t write fiction, here’s something about the writing world that you may not know: authors have to be marketers. Yes, even traditionally-published authors, because apparently even the big publishers don’t invest a lot in marketing authors unless they are big names. I’m going to admit 2 things up front that will color the rest of this post: I find this fact frustrating. With a family and a day job, I barely have enough time to write, let alone learn how to market my writing. When I first started writing, I thought that’s what publishers got paid to do, seeing as how they have…
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Where do I draw the line? (#IWSG)
It seems like everyone has an opinion these days about what writers should and shouldn’t do: Show me all the sex! Keep the sex behind closed doors. Write about diverse characters! Don’t write about identities you don’t share. Write honestly about difficult topics. Stop writing about rape. And on and on. Yeah, those are oversimplifications, but sometimes the discourse about what writers should write isn’t very nuanced. So today I’m going to piss off everyone by wading into these controversial waters. I’ve written about this topic before, but I’m going to get into it in a bit more depth in this post. But first: This post is part of the Insecure…
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Define your own success in 6 easy steps (#IWSG)
Today we’re going to talk about success. I’m not going to define it for you, and I’m not going to tell you how to get it. I suck as a self-help guru. Instead, I’m going to suggest a way of thinking about success that doesn’t get much traction in our rise-and-grind culture. But first: This post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group monthly blog hop. On the first Wednesday of each month, I and my fellow insecure writers post something related to writing, and then we visit the blogs of our fellow members and read and comment on their IWSG posts. This month’s optional question is, How do you…
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Read these 6 Books to Improve Your Fiction Writing (With a Sex-Related Bonus)
When I first started writing fiction back in 2014, I devoured books about writing. Nerdy little librarian that I am, I was sure I could learn this writing thing from a book. Or three books. Or maybe twenty. And you know what? I did learn. I read, then I wrote, then I read some more, then I wrote some more, and I got a little better. I still made mistakes, but I made better mistakes. You can’t learn to write from a book–you learn to write by writing–but books (and blog posts and podcasts and YouTube videos and, especially, critique partners) help. So today I’ll share my top 6 writing…
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What would make me quit writing (#IWSG)
This post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group monthly blog hop. On the first Wednesday of each month, I and my fellow insecure writers post something related to writing, and then we visit the blogs of our fellow members and read and comment on their IWSG posts. This month’s optional question is, What would make you quit writing? Sometimes these IWSG monthly questions are timely. Back in April, I wrote about a problem I was having with my right arm. In looking over that piece, I realize I failed to explain exactly what went wrong and why I included a pretty diagram of arm veins in the post. Ah,…
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Prepping for #PitMad (#IWSG)
Thursday I’ll be pitching my time travel romance, Vanishing, Inc., in #PitMad. What, you ask, is PitMad? It’s a pitch party on Twitter, in which unagented authors like yours truly try to distill their magnum opuses into a 280-character tweet in the hope of attracting an agent’s attention. And I thought writing a query letter was hard. Fortunately, there’s lots of great advice out there for PitMad virgins like me. I’ll share the most useful tips I found, but first: This post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group monthly blog hop. On the first Wednesday of each month, I and my fellow insecure writers post something related to…
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Writing as risky business–or how to offend everyone (#IWSG)
I participate in the monthly IWSG (Insecure Writers Support Group) blog hop. This month’s optional question is: Are you a risk-taker when writing? Do you try something radically different in style/POV/etc. or add controversial topics to your work? When people make lists of the riskiest professions, those lists include jobs like mining and commercial fishing, not writing. But writing carries its own, albeit less deadly and/or smelly, risks. The most common one is poverty, because writing pays crap, but I’m not going to talk about that today. My day job keeps me in Pop Tarts and Extra Toasty Cheez-Its, so I shouldn’t complain. The IWSG question of the month mentions…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
