Author Archives: CrissyMoss

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About CrissyMoss

I've been writing as long as I can remember.

Unintentionally offensive

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Yesterday at work a customer made an off hand remark about getting something free. Lots of people do this, nifty percent of the time they are teasing. We laugh, I say sorry can’t do that, and we go on our ways.

But yesterday was a bit different. We laughed, then he said “I’m just kidding. I work for what I have. I’m a conservitive, not a liberal. I don’t expect anyone to just give me anything.”

I was a little offended. First time in a really long time that I’ve ever been offended. I don’t necessarily consider myself a liberal, but I have been on public assistance before. Even now I have free medical from the state because I can’t afford health care. And this is what this person thinks of me? That I just want free hand outs instead of working for myself?

I laughed it off and let him go his way without saying anything. He was a grumpy old man, and a customer. Picking a fight would never change anything. What’s worse, even when confronted with their ignorance they won’t change their mind.

I hated being on public assistance. Every time I had to pull out that damn food stamp card I felt like I was a failure. It made me question my value to my children. My value as an individual.

I am so grateful I live in a country that gives food to the hungry, even if it is done so begrudgingly, and at the same time they give it to you they are making you feel guilty for using it. Without those food stamps there where months when my children and I would have gone hungry. Because of food stamps my children ate, and I only went hungry a few times. (They really dont give you much.)

The guilt is awful. I once put an energy drink on a counter along with some food because I was really tired from working and going to school, and wanted a little pick me up. “Food stamps don’t cover that,” the cashier said.

Ya. I know. That’s why I have a job, and I also get money from student grants that pays for this. Just ring it up, will ya?

Then there are the people who say “well you shouldn’t have had kids if you couldn’t afford them.” To everyone who says this FUCK YOU! I could afford them when I had them. I wasn’t on state assistance from the moment I had them.

Shit happens, things fall apart and you thank god, or the little fairies, or the flying spaghetti monster that there is state assistance because your friends and family will not be feeding your children when the shit hits the fan.

Having been poor I envy people in countries like Sweden and Norway that have good schools, and health care for everyone. Right now I have to deal with lots of little cavities and two more root canals because I couldn’t go to the dentist for more than fifteen years. I almost died once because my job wouldn’t let me take time off work when I was sick and I ended up with pneumonia for a month. I was too afraid to go to a doctor because I didn’t have insurance and we already went bankrupt once because of medical bills. But we didn’t go bankrupt fast enough. We were evicted, and lost our car because of garnishments when we couldn’t afford to pay for the life saving surgeries my husband and my son had.

“Then why did you get a divorce? Two paychecks are better than one.” You would rather people stay miserable and unhappy, or in abusive relationships because you don’t want to pay an extra one percent in taxes to help the poor?

“But there are soup kitchens, churches, shelters for the homeless etc. Etc.” do you want to stay in a dorm room with hundreds of people you don’t know with your children? There are people that get raped, stabbed, robbed  and worse in those places. Does it feel good to go to a soup kitchen every day to eat with your children? Or is it easier to get a little food stamp card so that I can go to the grocery store like normal people? Besides if every hungry person in the area went to these places they would run out of money and food a lot faster.

The attitude of many people in this country is “it’s your fault you are poor and you have to get yourself out of it.” They don’t consider accidents, job layoffs, medical conditions, or just bad luck. They can’t see that helping a person is far better for everyone than keeping them down.

“It’s my taxes!” And you’re right. It was my taxes too. I worked, I paid, and then when things went bad I used them. Even if I hadn’t what is better, paying one percent of your income to help the poor and sick, or paying 30% of all taxes for military, NSA, an unending war on terror, spying on everyone, passing million dollar pensions, and a lot of other things that probably could be cut or shrunk. But you’d rather cut services to the poor which consists of about 22% including health benefits for anyone who needs them.

It’s really frustrating that the same people who make you feel guilty for not making enough to live are the same people that say “we can’t raise minimum wage! That would hurt everyone.”

Do you really hate the poor so much that you want them to stay poor? Do you really care so little for others that you’d rather send drones to shoot up wedding parties and arrest people for feeding the homeless?

I haven’t been “proud to be an American” in years. And attitudes like this man’s are why. Like our government forcing drug testing for being on state assistance, or locking away people who told the truth.

This country is 14th in education and 37th in health care. The only thing we rank number one in is imprisoning our own people!

When will we learn that helping people is better for everyone then keeping them down?

The rise of the “boring” story

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Science fiction and fantasy are known for their action. Sword fights, space ship battles, magic spells and solar storms. All of the exciting bits that make us cling to the edge of our seat. I even write a bit of this myself.

So imagine my surprise that my favorite reads this past year didn’t have any of that. At least not in the traditional sense.

Take “The Name of the Wind” as an example. There isn’t a lot of fighting in that book. 600 pages of studies, trying to get into the archives, miss adventures with girls, and a rivalry with another classmate. Not a whole lot of magic or swordplay. It was all about the main character using his wits to outsmart everyone else.

“The Martian” is another one. There is some action in the sense that he is trying to survive, and everything is going wrong, but the majority of the story is about the main character using his wits, and science, to figure out how to survive in a harsh environment. 95% of the story is one person against a landscape.

Nathan Lowell’s clippership books are about playing the markets and rising in rank. Much of “Wool” is about the mystery of the setting. All books I loved.  All books with little to no actual struggle against good and evil. No main bad guy. No saving the world. Just quietly making their way in their own fashion.

It goes against conventional wisdom . I hear so often that you may “write to the market” but which market?

The times are changing. What makes a good story isn’t always good verses evil. Sometimes it’s just a man verses the environment, or the subtle hint of a mystery to be solved. Sometimes it’s just good old fashion economics.

This shows me that I need to be true to the story, no matter where it leads. No one knows what will make a hit book some day. No one can predict what will catch on and what won’t. You can only be true to the story, and make it the best that you can.

And it isn’t even just in books. The Anime “Spice and Wolf” is about a wild goddess learning about buying and selling between cities and countries. It’s fasinating. “Hetalia” is a funny way of teaching history. Then you have nerdcore music about games, history, computers, etc. Or we can go into games were thousands of them are just about solving puzzles, or just surviving.

Write what you love. Do what you love. Be friendly and open. Show your work to others. SOMEONE out there will like it if it’s interesting. You just have to keep working toward finishing it, whatever it is.

Grasshopper Writing

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I mentioned that I wrote a blog post and would post it when I was on Buddy’s Writing show the other day. Sorry for the delay, but sleep wouldn’t allow me to put it off any longer. So, without further adu, the Grasshopper Method:

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People often ask: How do you write?

It seems like a simple question, but everyone has a different answer. The most common is “put your butt in the chair and write.” But that doesn’t answer HOW you write. For that most people talk about pantsers, plotters, and in betweeners.

I do something that is part pantser, part plotter, and part crazy person who likes shiny things far too much. I heard someone else describe it as “the grasshopper method” and thought that fit perfectly.

Let me try and put it visually, and then maybe you might start to see why it’s…well you’ll see.

Imagine you are in the shower (because all great ideas start in the shower, right?) and the shower door is ninety percent fogged up, with a few places that are transparent, or half transparent.

The shower door is your blank page. It is where you are writing the story. Just beyond the shower door is the entire plot of the story, from beginning to end, neatly laid out in story boards. Through the clear places in the fog you can see little glimpses of the story: a character, an item they are searching for, the ending. The rest is obscured by the fog.

When I finally sit down to write a story I usually already have most of the plot in my head. I can see vague glimpses of the story because I’ve been chewing on it for several months, or years, already and have built it up in my subconscious. Little pieces might be missing, like how they get from point A to point B, or why they did this thing toward the end, but the majority of the story is right there behind the fog.

So I start clearing away the fog to get a clearer view. I jump to this patch that seems a little brighter and find the young prince and his entourage assaulting a toy castle in their pajamas. Up above that I find a mother desperately trying to keep her calm as her world is falling apart. I find a glade where something magical is waiting to be found, but I can’t quite clear away enough fog to see what that item is. I keep clearing, and I keep sorting, and eventually there comes a moment where everything snaps into focus. The last bits of fog are gone and the entire story board is laid out.
timoneIf you have seen a story board you know that it is made of a bunch of pictures. Each picture represents a scene. Once you have all the pieces of the story board you don’t quite have a complete story yet. Sometimes you have to rearrange things so they make more sense. Sometimes there are scenes in between the scenes that are missing. A lot of the time it is just a few little strokes of a pen (or in a writers case, a few paragraphs) that connect two of the pieces together.

When I sit down to write I write one piece at a time, and slowly connect them. Sometimes I rearrange the pieces. Sometimes I have to delete, or add in pieces. Sometimes I just have to hope I find that missing magic item in that glade and figure out what the heck it does. The story is already in my head, though, and I just have to coax it out. One tiny piece at a time.

The grasshopper method is not for everyone. In fact I would say it is something to be avoided. I don’t only skip between scenes in a story, I sometimes skip between books in an attempt to find some thread of a story that will come to the surface of the fog in my mind.

This has lead to other problems. It’s unlikely I will ever have a co-author because who could work with someone who can’t work in a straight line? I’m unpredictable, and I am constantly changing.

I’ve gotten better over the years. I’ve learned to do some beats to make the story boarding process faster, but even then I sometimes can’t seem to focus on one board at a time, I have to skip around to find the one that is speaking to me that day. Story beats have increased my output from two hundred words a day to almost a thousand though, so I’m not entirely upset about it. My goal is to get to three thousand words a day by the end of the year. It’s going to be tough, especially since half the year is already over. I’m giving myself permission to take breaks for marketing, editing, formatting, etc etc. And just to have fun. But if I can writing more on the days I do write it means I can have a lot more finished by the end of the year.

With the grasshopper method it is more about spending the time with butt in chair then anything else. The more I write the closer I get to completing something. And sometimes that means having several projects done in close succession, while other months it means nothing is finished. It’s frustrating. But it’s also the way my brain works.

 

Just a reminder, you can find my email newsletter here to find out about new short stories, or novels being published. Sometimes they are free. Also, Witch’s Sacrifice is out. It will be $2.99 till the end of the week then it goes up to $4.99. I should also start having audio books out next month.

Wide Release

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wpid-wp-1427063101748.jpegThis is the first time that I’ve actually put a book up on ALL the platforms.

Paperback on createspace, kindle, Kobo, itunes, B&N, then Draft2Digital also had Inktera and Scribd.

Is it useful? I’m not sure yet. I’ve never had a book on most of these sites. I still haven’t figured out how to post a book to google books. At the very least maybe someone will notice it and pick it up now and then. I’ve had books up on Smashwords and Kobo before, but really the only place I’ve sold many books is Amazon so…I figure it isn’t a bad thing to have them all out there.

Draft2Digital was surprisingly easy to set up and use. I know people have said it was, and after trying to get through the meat grinder over at Smashwords I just didn’t believe them. It was incredibly easy though and everything just went through without a hitch.

So…the book is out, the book is beautiful, and I can’t wait to get my own copy (of the final version) in the mail to stick on my shelf. It even has a map of the world so people can follow along in the journey!

This experience has been all about learning. With the short stories I already have out it was a lot simpler. They are often just one story, no need for chapters, maps, or major formatting. The trick with short stories is about telling a cohesive and compelling story in few words. With long format, like this novel, it’s about immersing the reader in the world, and sticking with that immersion for quite a while. Formatting consistency helps with that. Going from one chapter to the next and seeing the same images and typography. Making sure you don’t accidentally have a type change on the next page.

There is just so much to do. So many little things that can go wrong. And one little thing isn’t too bad, but thousands of them is TERRIBLE and will cause you to fail. So you have to carefully go through everything over and over again until you fix all those little things. Like the name that was spelled wrong even after three edits and my own proof reading. Or the time I formatted it with the wrong page size. Or trying to get the map to lay in the book JUST RIGHT. All those little things and more.

This means that I have to finish the next two books. I’m just glad they are already mostly done, lol, because this process takes a while.

A quick update

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UPDATE: It went live a lot faster than expected. You can find it here.

wpid-wp-1427063101748.jpegI just pushed publish on “Witch’s Sacrifice” for all the different stores. I even added it to draft2digital to try and get it on nook and itunes. Hopefully that works since I’ve never done that before.

The various outlets will take a couple days (if not a week) to process everything, but it will probably be up on Kindle tomorrow.

The print version…I did another mistake last night, uploaded the wrong interior file so had to reupload everything today. But that will also be out, hopefully, by Monday.

The price will be $2.99 to start with. It’s a full length novel, so the price is going to be $4.99 but I want everyone who’s been following this for a while to get a discount.

So, start looking for that here Thursday or Friday!

I would absolutely love to hear what you think of the book.

And don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter here so that you can hear when the second book in the trilogy is out.

Reading

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The last two months I’ve read a lot of books. It’s made me quite happy, so I thought I’d share them with you.

Fortunately the Milk by Neil Gaiman

A very short, humorous read about a father trying to get milk for his children. Fortunately the milk is there right when he needs it to deal with time traveling stegosauruses and pirates.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

An amazing narrative about Kvoth, an unassuming bar keep that once had a magnificent life. Or so he says.
I listened to this on audiobook and I liked the narrator. He does great voices for each of the character and really helps you get into the story. Plus there are so many twists and turns to follow, and it’s such a long book, that I was happier listening to it then reading it on my phone.

Tiny Quest Staring Princess Sassafras by Matt Youngmark

Cute little paperback I picked up at Norwescon with nice illustrations. It’s a fun read, and a nice collectible.

Zombocalypse Now by Mat Youngmark

A terrible read in the fact that I KEEP DYING! The zombies just like my brains I guess. Great twist on the “Choose your own adventure” style of writing with 70+ endings, only 5 of which you survive in.

Hidden Shadows by SR Gilmore

A girl with no magical powers has to help a sexy guy from another plane of existence try to figure out why the hell there is a baby dragon dropped on his back step. The world building is great, and the tension between the two main characters is very well done.

Murder of Crows by Annie Belle

This is book two in the 20 sided sorceress series. I really liked the first so I picked up the second. There is romance, but I really enjoyed the gamer (table top and RPG) references.

Shaman Tales 1: South Coast by Nathan Lowell which I actually listened to on Podiobooks. It’s also on amazon.

I loved Nathan Lowell’s clipper ship stories so much that I was thrilled to find out he’d written this one. It’s about a fishing village and how they are trying to bring in enough fish to satisfy the corporate planets quota. Lots about commerce, efficiency, fishing, and just the every day life of traders. And then there is the shaman…

PS. If you like chose your own adventure, or text based games, you should look at this week’s Humble Mobile Bundle. It includes some great interactive stories that I’ve been playing in my spare time. You get to read and hand at the same time! https://www.humblebundle.com/mobile

It got away with me…

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3I have been trying to do VEDA (vlog every day in April) this month, but I am horrible at finding something to vlog about. Mostly I’m terrible at picking up my phone and vlogging even when I don’t feel like it. (Yesterday’s VEDA was about my board games.)

 

It’s like the same muscle you use to write, or do anything creative I think. You have to do it even when you don’t want it. It’s not learning to do that thing. I know how to vlog, and I know what works best for me to get the words out. I know that sometimes I have to stop the camera and start again, deleting the old footage. I know that I can’t really edit it much afterward or it will never get done. I know these things.

But the desire to do it, the…what is the word I’m looking for? The stick to it-ivness of things. Going on, and pressing forward even when you don’t want to do it. Tenacity? Persistence? Maybe both.

I think that mental muscle — the one that helps you do a thing that you want to do even when there is nothing in your life to help you do it, nothing to encourage you, no forth coming reward from doing it — has to be exercised like any other muscle in your body. The rewards are so intangible and distant that we have to persevere and find small rewards  before we find the large one at the end.

It’s like a dog getting a treat. You give him a treat for sitting, and he learns to sit when you tell him to. While all he cares about is the treat at first, the end result is a better environment, a happier home, and everyone has a better time of it in the end. But that end is so far off the dog can’t see that as the reward for his learning to sit on command. The two concepts can’t even meet in his mind, so instead he gets treats.

Humans, like dogs, can be trained in many ways. Our parents train us when we are younger. They teach us language, walking, sports. They influence our likes and dislikes. They teach us what is socially acceptable. And they even encourage self determination, or sitting in the back of the class and letting life happen to you.

Because that is what it all comes down to in the end. Are you sitting in the back of the class letting life happen to you, or are you actively chasing life by it’s tell and saying “this is what I want, this is what I’m doing, and this is how I’m going to try and get it. And if that doesn’t work then I’ll just try something else.”

My parents were very much of the first type. Sit down, shut up. Do as I say. Actually, it was more of a “we have our life, you go do anything that keeps you busy so you don’t interfere with our life.” My husband was the same. It was reinforced over and over for decades that I should be seen and not heard, and probably not seen most of the time either.

So I completely understand if you are having trouble taking initiative in your life. If you are having trouble coming out of the shadows and into the light. If you want to be seen and heard, and felt. If you want to be counted as a person with individual ideas and plans instead of part of the crowd. I understand, and I encourage it even when others are still telling you to sit down, shut up, and pay attention to what they are teaching. Even when the teachers are insisting that their way is the only way, so learn or get out. Even when the art council says “that’s not art because we don’t think so.” Even when every fiber in your body says “I want to sleep, or curl up on the couch and watch TV” instead of picking up the pen, or the paint brush, or the leather working tool.

I get it. I’m there with you. I want to create, but I also want to watch TV and read books. I want to lay out in the sun and watch the ocean dancing on the sand as the winds play over the vast expanse. I want to breath in the scent of delicate flowers, and fall into the soft nothingness of dreams.

And there is nothing wrong with all of those things. But the people who persevere, those who stretch that muscle that helps them to keep going even when everything is against them, they are the ones that will be remembered long after tomorrow has faded away. And that is a treat worth practicing for.

I made a mistake

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It has been brought to my attention that in yesterdays blog post I came off as unhappy with the editor who is working on my book. I’d just like to say that I’m very sorry for coming across that way, and that was not my intention.

Yesterdays post was about three things. My insecurities about my writing. My progress in dealing with those insecurities. And the idea that not everyone is going to mesh well together. I’m constantly working on the first two, and I’d like to say that just because two people don’t agree on everything it doesn’t mean one is right or wrong, it just means they didn’t mesh together well enough on that topic. It happens.

In this case…the issues were mine. The edits were incredibly professional and very well done. Less than 12 hours after posting that post I got back my second round of edits with a very nice email saying how much she liked the magic system I developed for the story, and that those scenes were her favorite parts. These kind words provided a much needed boost to my confidence.

It’s true that we are all in different places along our paths in life/career. Some of us are at the point where we can just separate ourselves emotionally from the things we create. Some are able to say, “That is the work and this is me and the critiques I get on that thing aren’t personal in any way.” Some of us aren’t able to make that separation. This experience has taught me that I am somewhere in between, and I freely admit it.

Am I unprofessional? Hell yeah. Am I insecure? Two for two! But I’m learning, and that was the entire point of yesterdays post…that I didn’t take the criticism well. I failed, and I wanted to run like a dog with their tail between their legs but I wasn’t going to let myself give up.

My current editor is fantastic, and is making my story better. I don’t know if she “gets me” yet, we haven’t talked enough for me to know that. All I know is that her work, her edits, are good and she did nothing wrong. All the fault was mine, and mine alone.

All of us who deal with editors know that there are good ones, bad ones, and a range of editors in between. Finding the right editor to work with means looking for one that does a great job, who understands your work and understands you. This takes time, and a lot of trial and error.

So, again, I’m sorry if I came across the wrong way. I really didn’t mean for it to seem I was attacking or upset with anyone in any way. I was just expressing the frustrations that a lot of new authors (new anythings really) have when they come face to face with their insecurities. I hope I keep moving forward, making strides to break my insecurities. What I do know is that I’m going to continue to write about that progress here. I think admitting I have issues is the only way to overcome them.

I want to quit

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(I added an addendum to this, so you might want to read that as well.)

I want to quit. I want to pull all my books off the Internet, go curl up in a ball, and cry myself to sleep.

How dare I even try to write an entire book. Who am I to think my words would be worth reading. They are stupid, grammatically incorrect, full of inconsistencies and pov issues, unworthy of anyone ever reading, let alone actually paying for.

I knew a lot of this before I wrote a novel. I knew, for example, that I almost always miss compound words because I just don’t know when a word is a compound or when it is two words. I often over use commas (according to some), and I sometimes forget to add dialog tags because I just don’t think about it.

I knew all of that, and more, but I dared to write a novel anyway.

Then I got the edits back, and I struggled through them for days. I learned about dialect issues, and phrasing. I learned that subtle points of description are sometimes pov issues. I learned that words and phrases I use every day aren’t considered “proper English.”

When done with the edits I was exhausted, sad, and feeling like I made a mistake. I expressed my frustrations and heard “the editor is only trying to help” and then I went in my room, and I cried.

Editing hurts.

This was my first “professional edit.” I’ve gotten edits before, but this was completely different, and it hurt. It cut deep and it left me thinking “what the hell was I thinking trying to write a novel? You’re not good enough, Crissy. You don’t even speak proper English, how can you write it? You never should have tried this.”

I’ll be honest. I haven’t written anything in three days. I’m trying. I look at the page and all I see are all the mistakes. I can’t get out of editing mode and get back to writing. And yes, some of it is definitly self pity, but a huge part of it is just me unsure if I am good enough to do this thing that I’ve always wanted to do. Is there a good enough?

Every editor I’ve had before has added some encouraging comments. They said they liked a line, or I used that punctuation right, or when returning the manuscript there is a note just saying how much they really enjoyed it.

This editor did none of those things.

Gregg reassures me that the editor is doing their job. They are paid to edit, not hold my hand and encourage me. And I get that, I really do. But it doesn’t sting any less.

I want to quit. I want to run away and forget I ever tried this.
But I’m not going to.

I still think my stories are good stories. I still think they deserve to be told. I want them to get out and be read.

Maybe it’s the “professional writer” part I’ll reevaluate, and just be happy being a pulp fiction writer. It’s not a bad thing. I love pulp fiction books. Millions of people read pulp fiction every day. Maybe it’s not exactly what I wanted, but it beats not writing at all.

Am I happy I did the editing? Not today. Today I’m raw and hurt and unsure of everything I’m doing. Give me some time and maybe I will be.

Did I learn anything from it? Lots of things. In that way this experience was good for me. Hopefully it will make my writing stronger. Only time will tell.

Will I do this again?

I’ll be honest with you…My confidence is a fragile thing. Every time I get shredded like this I hear the ex husband in my ear telling me over and over and over that I’m not good enough. No one will ever love me. No one will ever want me. “Who told you to think that way?” I hear it, and slip back into the victim I use to be. I start feeling useless and worthless like I will never, ever, be good enough for anything. And I retreat into the shell I carefully built around me to keep from being hurt. It makes me want to quit.

So no, I won’t be doing this exact process again. I need the little bits of hand holding, and encouragement. I need to know that the person editing my work genuinely likes it so that when the red ink starts flowing it doesn’t hurt quite as much.

Maybe in a few years my nerves will be a little less raw and I can try again. But not now…not after this one.

And the best part? I have two more rounds of editing to go. I’m going to do it. I’m going to pull up my big girl pants and I’m going to wade through the red ink. Then I’m going to go cry a little more and do it all over again.

Because sometimes making good art hurts like hell.

Confessions of a Slow Writer

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There are a lot of new books out this year aimed at helping writers learn to write fast. “Increase your word count to 2000, 5000, or even 10k words a day!” they proclaim in bright colored words across the cover. It’s the ideal, or so you would think from all the writing podcasts.

But what about the slow writers? It isn’t as though we CHOOSE to be slow. Some of us have day jobs, or children, or family obligations. Some of us can only write when our child takes a nap. Or in between classes at the local college. Or on breaks at work.

What we should keep in mind is that no one starts out writing at blazing fast speeds. We all had a first book, and 99.9% of those first books are horrible books that get shelved, or thrown away never to see the light of day again. A good majority of those books were written over the course of months, if not years. My first book, for instance, took five years to complete. I started writing it when I was 16. A few weeks after completing it I lost the file on my computer. It was just gone and there was nothing I could do about it. I did have half of the book printed out for later editing, but I was so depressed about the lost files after five years of writing that I haven’t ever looked at it again.

Parts of that first novel have spun off several other works. Several of the themes keep reappearing in my work, because they were my life. I’ve also added to the themes and characters as I got older, giving them more notes to expand upon.

After I complete each thing, be it novel or short story, I get a little faster at completing things. I’ve done NaNoWriMo six times now, and ‘won’ most of the time. The things that came out were often bad, but salvageable. They could be rewritten, edited, expanded upon.

One year for NaNoWriMo I wrote nothing but short stories. 50,000 words of short stories is a lot of short stories. I believe I completed five for that month. All of them are now published in my Small Bites collection, along with several others started during that time.

For the entire year of 2014, and NaNoWriMo of 2013, I worked on a project called “Mermaid’s Curse”. It has since been renamed to the “Witch’s Trilogy” and will start being published this year. I’m still working on books 2 and 3.

So the confession of this slow writer? I might be slow, but I’m still making progress. I’m still accomplishing my goal of putting out books, and completing my stories.

There are so many people around the self publishing community that are saying “write fast, the faster you write the better it is for you,” and they aren’t wrong. But some of us can’t write that fast… yet.

The more you practice, the better you’ll get at just letting yourself write and not getting in your own way.
The more you write the more comfortable you’ll be with the process.
The more stories you tell the better your stories will be the first time you write them.

It’s a process. It takes time. DON’T GIVE UP just because you’re a slow writer. Give yourself time to finish what you started, even if it takes months, or even years. You’ll get there.