Tag: Reading

Writing Journal 11.17.2019: Diving deeper into fantasy and keeping up with things

I’m sort of in a weird place in my life. I’d have to say that for at least the past three years, I’ve been in a transitional period of time.

 

I’ve been counting down the time when both of my kids were going to be out of high school and starting their journeys into adulthood. In May of next year my daughter will graduate from high school. I think my wife (Laura) and I had been looking toward that date for a while as an opportunity to make a change. As it turned out, she finally got a great job opportunity. This summer, it looks like I’ll be moving away from Muscatine, the town I’ve lived in off and on for 30 years, and it’s not likely I’ll ever go back except for a visit.

 

I’ve begun to wonder how this uncertainty might be affecting my writing. Much of the writing advice that I’ve ever heard says you should try to establish yourself as a regional writer, but I’m going to be leaving my region in less than a year. I’ll be in central – well, south central Iowa, and there appears to be a good community of writers in Des Moines. I’m not sure how many writers there are in the county that I’m going to be living in, but given there’s only a few thousand people in the town I’m living in, there might not be as many as I knew in Muscatine. But, I will be looking for them, as well as trying to hang on to the writing connections I have made during my time in Eastern Iowa.

 

So, that means that I’m marking time on many things, even on where I’m going to live and work and what that is going to look like. However, there are several months before that finally happens. And, like my wife, I have never been the most patient of people. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve been getting into more fantasy, getting so obsessed with Game of Thrones that much of my writing recently has been fanfiction. There’s a whole series of projects I should be working on, but my mind seems to be idling.

This blog seems to be getting more personal the longer it goes on.

I’ve been reading some more classic fantasy recently, trying to get more of a feel for the genre. On my reading list this week is The High King by Lloyd Alexander and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. I read The High King as a kid. I’ve never read Earthsea, but her book The Beginning Place was one of the best books I discovered as a teen. First impressions – The High King is definitely aimed at kids, and Earthsea is pretty good. However, you really have to use a magnifying glass to read the map there (see the featured photo for this entry). I’ve becoming a connoisseur of maps recently.

I’m going to close with the stats for this week. Not the worst, and fairly consistent work, even though production was not how it has been. Well, I’ll see what next week brings. Later, everyone.

+2,715 words written.

Days writing: 5 of 7.

Days revising/planning: 5 of 7 for  330 total minutes.

Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 7  of 7 days.

 

 

 

A Writer’s Biography, Volume III, Part 4: On Leaving an Author Behind

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A Message To Anyone Who Reads My Book…

…Glad you picked it up.

If you bought it, that’s great. Glad to get a few extra bucks into my pocket while telling you a story that, I think, is pretty cool. Trust me, I wouldn’t have spent years writing it if I hadn’t.

There’s also the chance, however, that you might have read it in the library. I’m in the process of getting some a copy dropped off at my library and maybe a couple of others around the area. Some of them also do ebook loaning, so I’m interested to see if they could do that, as well.

The point being, I appreciate anyone who reads my stuff, no matter whether you pay for it or borrow it from the library. If you are wondering how you can help me out, even if you can’t pay for my books, I have a way for you to do it.

Tell people what you thought about it.

Yeah, you can do that on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, but there’s a couple of other places it can be even more useful.

On Amazon, they give you space on the product page to leave a review of the book or product. Let me put out a personal plea for you to write a review there. Let people know what you thought of it honestly. Tell them what you dug about it and if anything could be improved, and leave it up there. In case you got it from the library and don’t know where to leave a review, here is the link for my author’s page on Amazon. Just go to one of the book links there and do a review. Yeah, you’ll have to sign up for an account, but you probably already have one and it’s free anyway, right?

Also, feel free to leave it on other sites. For example, this is the site for my ebook on Barnes and Noble. If you sign up for Goodreads, you can do that same thing – here is my author’s page there. You can even leave a review for my book on my publisher’s site and you don’t have to sign in for anything.

And don’t feel like you have to write three or four different reviews, either. Cutting and pasting is perfectly acceptable. 🙂

The point is, I would truly appreciate it if people would start reviewing my book, even if they don’t have 100 percent positive things to say about it. The more people start talking about my book, the more people start noticing my book, and the more likely it is that people start buying it.

Anything you can do, I thank you for it.