Z is for Zzzzz

Tired? I’m pretty wiped out. It’s been an intense month for blogging. I started off doing one or two posts a week in February and now I’ve done 26 in 30 days. That’s quite a leap. I had planned to do them in advance and have them scheduled ahead of time, but you know how that goes. 

It was a great experience, and I’m very pleased with what I managed to scrape together — although, if I had planned things better I would have edited my posts to be more concise and focused.

I doubled the amount of followers and most of my posts got a fair amount of comments, leading to some interesting debates. Those of you that stopped by on a regular basis, thank you for responding to my thoughts and ideas. I’m sure traffic will fall off after the challenge finishes, but I hope some of you will continue to drop by. I tried to visit as many blogs as I could, I hope to keep that up as much as possible.

So what next? 


I still have lots to say about the craft of writing and I very much intend to keep the focus on that. I’m interested in honing the craft beyond the basics found in most ‘how-to’ books. I think they provide good fundamental advice, but to really get your writing to the next level I think you have to be able to go from the general to the specific of your own stories, and you can’t ask a book to answer questions and explain things further. Even those sites that offer more specific commentary, on pitches and first pages or even first chapters, only get the opening ‘agent ready’ and can’t help with the book as a whole.

I’m hoping as I develop relationships with other writers, and become familiar with their writing, their goals and their individual voices, I’ll be able to offer much more targeted advice. Hopefully they’ll do the same for me. 

I believe a career in writing is more than selling a marketable product aimed at the broadest possible consumer base, I think it’s about the thing that excites and absorbs you and finding a way to pass that feeling onto the reader. You need to know the writer to be able to help with that. From going over outlines, to making characters fascinating, to working on satisfying plot twists and endings. If you’re serious about making your writing so good agents can’t say anything other than ‘Yes!’, stick around, maybe we can help each other out.

BTW, if you're curious to see what my own writing is like, you can find a sample: here.

This is an exciting time for writers. Finally the gates are being torn down and new paths are opening up, even if we don’t really know where they lead. I think it would be easy to let quality slide as access to the market becomes easier — only rigorous effort and ruthless (but trusted) peer-assessment will prevent that.

Glad to have made it through to the end. A very worthwhile experience, thanks to Lee and Alex and all the other sponsors, a big success I think. I’ll be posting at least twice a week from now on and it’ll feel pretty easy (I’m hoping). But first a nice long rest (well, a couple of days at least). I leave you with a song. 

cheers,

mood