Happy Long Weekend!

Ok, so it really isn't a long weekend for me. As a mom I don't get days off and papers have to be delivered every day so I don't really get time off, but you get the picture.

First of all I want to take a moment to thank the 19 hotshot firefighters from Prescott that lost their lives this past week. I knew one and worked with his wife and I can't imagine the grief she is experiencing. I'm grateful for the opportunity to help out, even if it was just a little. I have access to extra news papers and was able to get some to her for a scrapbook for their four kids. It wasn't much, but it felt good to help.

Alright, so this week I found Veronica Roth's blog and wow was I impressed. She has a lot of really good advice and if you haven't read it, or Nathan Branford's blog, I highly recommend it. Anyways, it occurred to me this week that I am missing a key element to the whole writing experience. For a long time I've felt alone in this process. People around me really haven't wanted to read my work and if they do, they don't really give me feedback. Just tell me it's good. Don't get me wrong, I love those little words, but it doesn't really help me get better.

So, as I always tend to do because it's the kind of person I am, I began researching other authors. It started with Robison Wells, moved to Cassandra Clare and ended with Veronica Roth. I felt alone without help and yet there it was, written in blogs on the internet. I needed to find an online writers group.

This past week I joined scribophile.com. At first it was exciting meeting new people who shared my interests, having people read a chapter I was able to post, but it does have a flaw. You can post using karma points, but you have to wait in line to get into a spotlight to be read. My problem: ya fantasy has a long line.

I've recently questioned my decision to become an author. It feels daunting. I read that Stephenie Meyer, Cassandra Clare and a few others started out writing fanfiction. I used to love to write fanfiction when I was yonger on fanfiction.net. My screen name was Phantom the Rogue, if you want to look it up. I know that fanfiction.net has a sister site called fictionpress.com. Maybe I'll try there and see if I can get feedback. In the meantime I wanted to share some stuff that I've learned in the last week or so.

Kerry Blare challenged me to read David Farlands Million Dollar Outlines. For anyone who doesn't know me I suck at outlines. I've been better recently. I wrote a timeline for OIK, and for SW, which I haven't told you about, I managed a small outline that looks a bit more like random thoughts on paper. I'm trying, I promise! The book isn't just about outlines though. It talks about what type of emotion you want to evoke with your book and looks into demographics and other things that I hadn't thought about. From what I understood, and this could be wrong, David Farland worked in Hollywood, or something similar. He has an insight that I found to be invaluable.

Who is David Farland you ask? Why, the author of the Rune Lords of course! He also has other series out and is a phenomenal author. If you haven't read him, I highly recommend picking up any of his books and definitely his writing books. In the meantime I'm going to see about editing a couple of manuscript I've got finished.

Later days!