1houreveryday

This short story and I need to come to an agreement about what happens next. 

Also why is my narrator so….wry?

A blog has officially agreed to review Child of Brii. More information to follow when things start happening!

I really want blueberry bushes and to figure out how to stop these ants from eating my strawberries.

Talking with Rod and life decisions

So I met with local up-and-coming author R.S. Belcher this week, who wrote The Six-Gun Tarot. (If you haven’t read it I suggest you do. Especially if you like graphic wierdness and the wild west.) Anyways, we talked a lot about his writing career and what he had done to get where he is, and he gave me some advice. Chiefly: go to conventions. Which you should all know by now.

In addition, we talked about how sometimes life can take you in directions that are sort of roundabout. Rod has been writing for years, and has had short stories published a long time before this book sale was made. The sale itself was made two years ago, and the book just came out earlier this year. So needless to say, it’s taken him a long time to get to this point in his career. He’s worked hard, and he’s always had it in his mind, and eventually it worked out. But he’s surely done other things, too, and a lot of those things haven’t had anything to do with writing for a living. This was great to hear, for me, for a couple of reasons. 1) I’ve already queried several books and stories and it’s nice to hear from another human being, face to face, that it’s okay to be rejected (even if I already know it) and that I should keep trying. 2) I’m currently moving away from writing and it’s been really preoccupying for me.

As you may remember, in June I left my full-time job as a corporate cog to try things like finding myself and writing lots more. I got a part time job working about 25 hours a week and found that it was manageable, finished a novel I thought for sure would sell, queried several short stories, self-published an ebook. The short stories didn’t go anywhere, I have yet to sell my third novel unsurprisingly (not that I’ve queried nearly as much as I should have) and the ebook has done better than it could have but not as well as I’ve liked.

But in February my hours started decreasing, and I left my old job for what I thought would be another 25 hour job only to find myself working full time again despite all my protests. I also found out I was going back to school in the fall. The program is not writing related.

So I seem to be at a crossroads. Writing takes a backseat, where I don’t want it to be, but I have to eat and I also would like to better my education and potentially make a life for myself that is both comfortable and allows me the time and resources to become a published author while still helping my community. The point being that it was really comforting to hear that someone besides myself had gone through similar distractions in life and managed to come back to writing in the end.

I don’t plan to stop writing, though I may be over in the lands of nonfiction for a while. This blog may change some, and I may change. That’s okay. Change is growth, if done well, and I plan to do it well.

So thanks, Rod, for talking to me.

10-10-12 fragment

In which I rip off T.S. Eliot because why not?

waterofthevalley:

April is the cruelest month

but November! November!

the stripes of dead trees laid bare

against the aching back of the sky

November is feet on cold stone

speckled with snow

and frosted glass, curtains closed, shuttered

no light

one’s payments counted out with cold hands

trembling fingers, this I have lost, and this…