Tag Archives: EM Castellan

by

Reader Appreciation Award!

I have received another award for my blog! It’s the Reader Appreciation Award and the wonderful Raewyn Hewitt nominated me. She is an Epic Fantasy writer who lives in New Zealand and is currently writing a trilogy entitled The Fall of the Kings. She has a great blog which chronicles her writing journey and quotes Tolkien and Doctor Who (what more can you ask for? Go and follow her already!).

So here are the rules for this award:

1. Identify and show appreciation to the blogger who nominated you.

2. Add the reward logo to your blog.

3. Tell your readers 7 things about yourself.

4. Nominate 5-10 of your favourite bloggers for this award.

5. Inform your nominees that you nominated them.

So I’m not really one to talk about myself, but here goes…

1-    Full disclosure. I’m 28.

2-    I live in England but my nationality is not British. Let the guessing game begin!

3-    I have lived in three different countries in the last ten years.

4-    I watch a lot of TV shows. Historical, SF or fantasy, I’ll give them a try. Right now I’m really into “Hell On Wheels” and “The Vampire Diaries”.

5-    I wrote my first novel at the age of 12. It was entitled “The Chronicles of a Girl on a Swing in Paris”. Please don’t judge 😉

6-    My current WIP The Last Queen is my 20th finished novel (!). I wrote the first draft in 2009. My cousin Elisabeth, who is my self proclaimed biggest fan and has read every single story I have ever written, chose that time to tell me that “maybe it was time to go out there and get my stories published.” However this endeavour turns out to be, I will blame it on her.

7-    My family is very supportive of my writing, even if they don’t actually, well, read what I write. My brother thinks that my WIP is “Game of Thrones with elves and werewolves”. My grandmother thinks it’s “something like Harry Potter”. My parents think it’s a masterpiece. I really hope they’re right.

Now on to the nominations of lovely blogger you should follow:

Elodie @ Commuting Girl A French girl living in Germany, and an aspiring author of YA novels (paranormal romance and contemporary romance) with a versatile blog.

Susan and Tyler-Rose @ The Feather and the Rose Two Epic Fantasy writers. One great blog tackling writing, revisions, queries and the epicness of it all.

Gina @ This Is Not Your Blog In her own words, a “mother, blogger, vlogger, writer, homeschooler, church-goer, nerdfighter, baker, cake decorator, avid reader, book reviewer.” She lives in Florida and her blog is a great read. Also I love her Fantasy Casting Feature.

Juliana Haygert When I started following her blog, she was a romance writer trying to get published. Today she is a published author. Yet she  is still this lovely Brazilian girl who lives in Connecticut and replies to all my tweets. This girl will go far, better get to know her now!

That’s it for me. For those nominated, there’s no pressure to participate. I just wanted to let my readers know how awesome you are!

 

by

ROW80 Check-In 10: Rae Carson’s success story

Hello gentle reader and fellow writers,

This week I have been hearing a lot about a British teenage writer who got a 6-figure book deal in less than 2 years. As dreamlike as these publishing stories are, I wanted to highlight another author’s story today.

Rae Carson is a YA High Fantasy author whose first book, The Girl of Fire and Thorns, came out in 2011. It was a nominee for the Andre Norton Award and the William C. Morris YA Debut Award. It was also an ALA (American Library Association) Top 10 Best Fiction for Young Adults honoree in 2012. The second book in The Fire and Thorns Trilogy, entitled The Crown of Embers, is coming out on September 18th 2012. Her third book, The Bitter Kingdom, will be published in 2013. In June 2012, she sold a new romantic fantasy trilogy set during the American gold rush to HarperCollins’s Greenwillow Books.

 

Rae’s journey into publishing is interesting because it was slow. She became serious about writing back in 2004, and it took her 7 years to get a book published. Along the way she sold a couple of short stories, wrote a first book which is still in her drawer, then in 2005 she wrote the first draft of The Girl of Fire and Thorns. She got an agent, and never sold the novel to a publisher. So she revised it and decided to go with another agent, who managed to sell the book within 24 hours. It took then another couple of years to have the book sitting on bookshelves in bookstores.

Here is what Rae says on her website:

“I graduated college with a degree in Social Science–which qualified me to flip burgers–and a mound of education debt. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up.

Well, that’s not true. I did know. I wanted to be a novelist. But that just wasn’t practical, and I had to come up with something else. I had to have a Plan B. So I tried bank tellering, secretarial work, customer service, inside sales, substitute teaching, data entry, logistics, and even machine shop-ing. I didn’t enjoy any of it.

In 2004, after quitting a very high paying job in a very toxic atmosphere, I decided to get serious about writing. It was the only thing I kept coming back to, the one thing that had held my interest over time and distance and lots of life change. So I joined the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror where I met my future best friends, my future husband, and my calling.

I spent the next few years happily writing awful stuff. During this time, I got to know C.C. Finlay online, and after going on three real-life dates, I moved from California to Ohio to marry him. The writing became a lot less awful, and eventually I sold my first novel to Greenwillow/HarperCollins.

Hindsight is easy, I know, and writing about the awkwardness of adolescence is way easier than living it. But I can say unequivocally that although growing up is hard, it’s totally worth it. It’s possible to become your better self. And dreams, no matter how impractical, are made to be pursued.”

So do you find this story inspirational? Do you believe the traditional route to publishing is too slow? Or does it guarantee great books from great authors for readers? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comment section!

You can find Rae Carson on Twitter and Facebook.

To write this post, I have used:

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/07/rae-carson-amulet-of-power/

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/09/13/fire-and-thorns-author-rae-carson/

My ROW80 update for this week:

this week I have tried writing a short story AND revising my WIP The Last Queen. The reuslt is that I have a unfinished short story and I’m late in my revisions. So for the last week of this round, I need to focus on revisions.

How are you other ROWers doing? Here is the Linky to support each other!

by

What is “strong writing” ?

One of the most common reasons for agents and publishers to reject a manuscript is « weak writing ». Rather than listing here what makes your writing weak, I’d like to offer a few pointers to help you make your writing strong – or stronger. I will use The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins as an example, since I think most of you have either read the book or seen the movie based on it.

What you need to work on to make your writing “strong”:

1-      The plot

In real life, things rarely go according to plan. Then why should they in books? Your Main Character needs to start out with a plan (for the day, for the year or in life). Then everything needs to go awry.

 In The Hunger Games, Katniss is constantly faced with the unexpected. She goes to the Reaping thinking she or Gale will be picked. It’s Prim who is chosen. She enters the arena thinking she’ll have to count only on herself to survive. Then she finds an ally in Peeta.

2-      The characters

The world cannot revolve around your Main Character. In some stories, the characters seem to exist for the sole purpose of helping the MC or making her miserable. When you’re told you need to “flesh out” your characters, it means you have to make them unique, but it also means you have to give them their own story, their own plan, their own desires, their own AGENDA that will have nothing to do with the MC.

In The Hunger Games, Effie has her own agenda (get promoted to a better district, have a good career) and it so happens that the best course of events for her is if Katniss wins the Games. So she helps Katniss along the way. But if you look at the story from her point of view, Katniss is a means to an end (at least at the beginning).

3-      The pace

Strong writing means no dull moments. It doesn’t mean you have to write an action-packed story in the strictest sense of the word, but it does mean things need to happen in every chapter, and there needs to be a “hanger” at the end of each chapter that will keep your reader reading.

In The Hunger Games, each chapter ends with a cliffhanger. If you write romance,  your “hanger” doesn’t have to be your MC waking up to “a wall of fire descending on” her, but it has to be something that makes the reader turn the page.

4-      High stakes

Having high stakes in your story means that your MC needs to be faced with hard decisions. Your reader needs to wonder what the outcome of the situation will be. Your reader needs to care about your MC making the right decision.

In The Hunger Games, the stakes cannot be higher since every decision Katniss is faced with means life or death for her or someone else. But a love triangle can constitute high stakes too. What works well in The Hunger Games is that Katniss choosing between Gale and Peeta is a very complicated decision, given the circumstances and who they are.

5-      Style

To avoid a so-called “awkward writing”, you may choose to write short, to-the-point sentences.

In The Hunger Games, Collins’ style is simple and it works. Each sentence is carefully worded, with judiciously chosen images. Example: “Behind Peeta, Cato slashes his way through the bush.” That’s 9 words. Yet we get a clear sense of the scene.

6-      World building / Descriptions

When your writing is strong, your reader doesn’t notice when you include world building or descriptions in your story.

By the end of The Hunger Games, the reader has a clear idea of what Katniss, District 12, the Capitol or the Games Arena look like, yet it’s hard to remember exactly when Collins described them. She intertwined the descriptions with her story.

7-      Depth

Strong writing is a tool to make your reader think. You read The Hunger Games for the story, the characters, the suspense. But the reason why so many readers enjoyed it so much is that it tackles important themes. It questions reality TV, freedom and the things we take for granted in our Western societies.

8-      Grammar, spelling and punctuation

No strong writing without them!

 

So strong writing makes effortless reading. Your readers shouldn’t be able to see through your writing devices. They should be able to believe in, and care about, your characters so much that when the Gamemakers announce that “both tributes from the same district will be declared winners if they are the last two alive”, they call out Peeta’s name at the same time Katniss does.

Do you agree? What makes “strong writing” according to you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section!

by

GUTGAA Pitch Polish

As previously mentioned on this blog, I am taking part in the Gearing Up To Get An Agent blogfest (GUTGAA) hosted by the amazing Deana Barnhart. This week is all about Pitch Polish and you can find my query and the first 150 words of my WIP The Last Queen here. Now, if you’ve read my query or part of my WIP before, know that my manuscript has been undergoing major revisions lately. I have also worked on my query, based on the comments I received a WriteOnCon. So I would be very grateful if you could have a look at my new pitch and give me some feedback on it. I’ll return the favour if you give me a link to your query in the comment section of this post!

And since I hate asking without giving, remember that you can still enter my 100 followers giveaway here and win books!

by

ROW80 Check-In 9 – Prologues: How and why to write one

Hello gentle readers and fellow writers,

Last week I came across an interesting post on the MythicScribes forum. It is a great forum for fantasy writers and a member called Lunaairis posted his thoughts on prologues on August 17th 2012.

Usually, writers are advised to avoid including prologues at the beginning of their novels. Prologues should be banned because they most likely are 1) unnecessary lengthy narrative of back story, 2) boring scene-setting that can be cut without harming the plot, 3) information that should be your chapter One, 4) something that readers don’t read anyway.

However many published Epic Fantasy books do start with a prologue and Lunaairis explains in his post when and how this is acceptable:

“I was looking at a post about prologues and I couldn’t help but think that there seems to be something wrong with people’s reactions to them. I for one like prologues as they can set the tone for the rest of the story; When they are prologues and not just masses of text. After reading Farlander (by Col Buchanan) I have realized what makes a prologue good, and why more fantasy stories need them.

1) A prologue should be like the story you will tell but in miniature, it should be no longer then your longest chapter and should never be split into parts (I’ve seen this done and it’s just horrendous). That said you should always leave the prologue to be the last thing you write. A prologue is so much like a door hinge I can’t even begin to explain. It is best used with the idea to gather readers; it’s a chapter the average man/woman or child can read at a book store to get a feel for the authors writing without going into the main story. It is what an author should use for getting the reader from the real world to their fictional world. Again like a door hinge it keeps the book open for the public eye to grab a glimpse.

2) The author can also use the prologue to slip in information that the other characters in the novel might already know (if it is important to the story). You wouldn’t want to write a chapter about a city falling to pieces, only for it to have no purpose for the rest of the story, waste-of-space much? (…) Don’t allow prologues to become information dumps, remember you are trying to get the average reader into your story, don’t bombard them with names that won’t or can’t be explained till 2-3 chapters in.

3) Prologues, after keeping in mind that they should not be long, they should also not be short. A prologue consisting of 1-4 paragraphs is rather useless; all the information presented could be bleed into the speech of some of the characters. Removing the need for the prologue all together. If there are only 1-4 paragraphs it’s likely that you just wrote an information dump and should delete it anyways.

4) There should be a story going on in your prologue, a beginning and an end. Introduce a key character in your story, Maybe a villain? The main character? A magic object? Something that has reason to exist, and has wants and needs. Present them a challenge; it could be a rival, a theft (the theft of a person’s life, an object, a person or a way of thinking) or maybe the end of a cycle. (…) Remember when coming up with the challenge, it may be a good idea to take the main problem of you fiction but show it on a miniature scale. If your story is about racism show a glimpse of the racism here.

5) Now show off the character or object’s skills by somehow getting them though the situation. This is a great way to get your reader interested in the character or object they are going to follow for the rest of the book. It’s time to show their talents, as this character or object may not be the only main character or object of the novel but is the one that pulls the story along, and likely won’t be showing up again for a few chapters.

6) Never talk history in the prologue; write as it happens. Do you remember sitting in those boring history classes with your unexciting history teacher? Thank god I loved history and never had a crappy history teacher. But I know other people who have and I also know they don’t like to read about it in their fiction, so keep it out of there! There is a time and a place to talk about the last great war between the Jubjubwicks and the Didolgigs but the prologue is not the place to be talking politics from a second source.”

So what do you think? Do you agree with Lunaairis? Have you included a prologue in your novel? If yes, what is it like? Or are you against prologues? Let me know in the comment section!

Finally, my update: I have had a good writing week after a very lazy summer on the writing front. I haven’t worked on my WIP, but I have written a short story, worked on my query letter and devised a new editing plan for my WIP. Next week I’m planning on diving back into editing…

How are you fellow ROWers doing?  Here is the Linky to the list of participants.

Happy writing!

by

Gearing Up To Get An Agent Blogfest – Meet and Greet

Hello gentle reader,

this month I am taking part in an exciting blogfest: Gearing Up To Get An Agent (aka GUTGAA) hosted by the amazing Deana Barnhart.

What is GUTGAA? you ask.

GUTGAA is a blogfest Deana Barnhart started last year “in the hopes that those of us striving to reach “agented” status could come together, polish those pitches and have fun at the same time.”

Today is the first day of this blogfest and it’s Meet and Greet time… If you want to join the fun and sign up for the blogfest, you can do so here. Then add a Meet and Greet post on your blog and you will have from today until Friday, Sept 7th to visit others’ blogs and get to know them. Have fun and visit as many as you can!

Questions for the Meet and Greet
–Quick bio

I am a writer of YA High Fantasy novels. I live in an English castle, travel extensively, read voraciously, listen to music bands few people have heard of and watch too many movies to count. In case you are wondering, I also have a full-time job, so I mostly write at odd hours and drink a lot of tea. I am also a member of the British Fantasy Society.

–Where do you write?
At home, at my desk in my living room. From my window I can see the castle’s park and the beautiful English countryside beyond. No need for a retreat for me!
–Quick. Go to your writing space, sit down and look to your left. What is the first thing you see?
My armchair. This is where I sit to read. And I read A LOT.
–Favorite time to write?
Evenings.
–Drink of choice while writing?
Tea!
–When writing , do you listen to music or do you need complete silence?
I need music to write. I even wrote a blog post about my favourite writing music.
–What was your inspiration for your latest manuscript and where did you find it?
I write epic fantasy. I have had my WIP in me FOREVER. I think I got the inspiration for it about ten years ago. I wanted to write a story with a strong female teenager as the main character. I also liked the idea of a fantasy land where humans were the lesser people. Finally I wanted to write a love story that would be as realistic as possible, although set in an imaginary land.
–What’s your most valuable writing tip?

Write every day, and NEVER give up.

Thanks for stopping by! Feel free to comment below and I will definitely pay your blog a visit.

Also you can enter my 100 Followers Giveaway here and win YA books!

Finally, I would love to hear from you on Twitter if you wish to know me better.

by

100 Followers Giveaway! (closed)

*Giveaway is now closed*

Welcome gentle reader,

today my blog is 6 months old AND it has reached 100 followers, so I’m hosting a very special giveaway to thank YOU, my amazing followers. The giveaway is open INTERNATIONALLY and it runs from today, Saturday, September 1st to Sunday, September 16th 2012.

ONE lucky winner will receive the TWO following books: Infinite Days and Stolen Night by Rebecca Maizel. Both books are new paperbacks (UK edition).

If you have been following my blog for a while, you know that I LOVE Rebecca’s YA series The Vampire Queen. I was lucky enough to do an interview with her a few months ago (you can read it here) and when Stolen Night finally came out in the UK in July, she OFFERED to send me a copy for myself AND a copy for a giveaway. That’s how amazing she is.

So in case you’re not convinced yet, I’m offering you a chance to read her awesome books. Stolen Night won’t come out in the US until January 2013, so this giveaway is open internationally.

You can watch the trailer for Infinite Days below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXYJQgS2UHE

And you can visit Rebecca’s website here and her blog here.

Giveaway information:

  • The giveaway is open until Sunday, September 16th 2012 at midnight (BST time)
  • To enter please fill in the contact form below with your name and email. You HAVE TO be a blog follower to enter. Please state if you follow by email, WordPress or RSS feed.
  • If you’re a Twitter follower , if you like my page on Facebook or if you tweet about the giveawau, this will grant you an extra entry. Mention it below.
  • Entrants must be at least 13 years of age.
  • This giveaway is open Internationally.
  • The winner will be chosen randomly, notified by email and will have 72 hours to reply or a new winner will be chosen.
  • I am not responsible for items lost in the mail.
  • I hold the right to end the giveaway before its original deadline without any prior notice.
  • I hold the right to disqualify any entry as I see fit.
  • Privacy information: no information given for this giveaway will be used for other purpose than this giveaway. All information provided (names, emails and mail addresses) will be deleted after the giveaway.

Good luck and feel free to leave me a comment below…

by

What is Gritty Epic Fantasy?

Hello gentle reader,

When people ask me what genre my WIP The Last Queen is, I usually reply “Fantasy”. But if I wanted to be precise, I would say “Gritty Epic Fantasy”. Usually I’m not that precise, because then I would have to explain what Gritty Epic Fantasy is and I would end up talking for 15 minutes…

So today I thought I would explain what Gritty Epic Fantasy is, just this once.

Let’s break it down, shall we?

According to Wikipedia,

Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common.

Epic Fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy that is set in invented or parallel worlds.

NB: Because they share so many similarities, Epic Fantasy and High Fantasy are often used as synonyms. In this post, I will not differentiate the two subgenres, although I do think there are some differences that distinguish them.

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are seen as the founders of the Epic Fantasy subgenre. Both authors invented imaginary worlds where their characters go on a great adventure. Their books focus on a good-versus-evil story and they were published during the first half of the 20th Century.

These books are all about escapism and heroism. In The Hobbit, Bilbo is on a quest to find a treasure guarded by a dragon. In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf comes back from the dead. In The Chronicles of Narnia, children protect the fictional realm from evil and restore the throne to its rightful line. In these first Epic Fantasy books, there are talking animals, mythical beasts, sword fights, magic at every turn and people rarely die.

As many other readers out there, I love those stories. But Fantasy literature is about being a metaphor for the world we live in. And this is 2012. Since the 1950s, society has changed. Readers have changed. They’ve grown up watching people getting killed live on TV, hearing about horrific cases of child abuse and reading about human trafficking in the paper. When they read Fantasy books, they want to read about characters who face similar challenges to the ones they do.

And that’s what Gritty Epic Fantasy, also known as Realistic Fantasy, has to offer.

The trend was started by Glen Cook’s Black Company series in the mid 1980s. Then George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series followed in the mid 1990s. And in the last ten years, this subgenre has grown exponentially, with authors such as Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch, K. J. Parker, Mark Lawrence, Steven Erikson and Brent Weeks.

In these books, the setting is still imaginary worlds. But instead of relying on complicated magic systems and weird creatures, these stories show us a world in shades of grey, where the characters are as flawed as we are, with the same emotions and reactions. These books touch on concepts which echo in our real world. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire tackles politics and relationships, Week’s Night Angel trilogy mentions child abuse and moral ambiguity.

In Gritty Epic Fantasy, there is no old grey-bearded wizard in robes to save the day. No quest to find a hidden treasure. No talking lions and children more powerful than kings. No brave knights who defy death. No world in black and white.

“There’s no guarantee that justice will win out or that a noble sacrifice will make any difference. But when it does, there’s something that still swells my chest. There’s magic in that…. It tells me that’s the way things are supposed to be.”

Brent Weeks, Beyond the Shadows

So maybe Gritty Epic Fantasy is not for you. But I find that this Fantasy subgenre is the one that echoes the most in me and this is what I write.

Some reading recommendations:

Black Company series   (Glen Cook)
A Song of Ice and Fire series  (George R.R. Martin)
Malazan Book of the Fallen series  (Steven Erikson)
The Deed of Paksenarrion  (Elizabeth Moon)
Prince of Nothing series    (R. Scott Bakker)
Acacia  (David Anthony Durham)
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant  (Stephen R. Donaldson)
First Law series  (Joe Abercrombie)
The Lies of Locke Lamora  (Scott Lynch)

The Night Angel trilogy (Brent Weeks)

Prince of Thorns (Mark Lawrence)

 On the web:

Gritty fantasy

http://bestfantasybooks.com/gritty-fantasy.html

Painting With Grey: The Development and Popularity of “Gritty Fantasy”

http://fantasy-faction.com/2012/painting-with-grey-the-development-and-popularity-of-gritty-fantasy

Why the Turn Towards Gritty Realism In Epic Fantasy?

http://io9.com/5850891/why-the-turn-towards-gritty-realism-in-epic-fantasy-authors-sound-off

So what do you think? Do read or write Gritty Epic Fantasy? Why or why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

by

ROW Check-In 8: Elizabeth May on Writerly Misconceptions

Hello gentle reader,

so I had a tough week. I was jet-lagged and I was having doubts about this whole “let’s get my book published” thing. So I didn’t write. Instead, I read great books and decided to postpone my writing until next week. And I found a post by debut author Elizabeth May. She posted it her blog on November 22d, 2011. Since then she has sold her YA steampunk novel THE FALCONER and it will be released in May 2013.

Here is her post:

Writerly Misconceptions: YES, YES, YOU DO WORK

Basically, I’ve come to understand that aside from the other things I have to do (that dissertation to finish, that photography business to run, that teaching anthropology thing I do), I have to write sometime.

Have to.  Because, while it might have been a hobby before, writing is now one of my jobs.  I have a trilogy to plan.  A sequel I should probably be writing as I type up this blog…  I am doing things!  Important things!  My heroine is a mess and I have to FIX HER.

So when I take a day and sit on my ass in front of the computer for hours, that’s not me being lazy.  That’s me bringing home the bacon.

The other day I asked Mr. May to do some task that I really can’t recall right now because I’m only on my third cup of coffee.

His response?  ”Wait, weren’t you home all day?”

Subtext?  ”You totally could have done this thing because while I was out working, you were sitting at home.”

It’s a totally innocent comment.  He’s right.  I was home all day.  I made two pots of coffee, clicked around on mah laptop, answered a few business e-mails, worked a bit on my dissertation write up that my supervisor is demanding — and oh yeah! I wrote some of that sequel.

Now, before anyone judges Mr. May (remember that I love him and he is not a writer), he totally didn’t mean this to sound dismissive of my work.  He is voicing a very common misconception about writers.  That writing a book is easy work* and that because most of us work from home, we are ”lucky” not to have to “go to work.”

Basically, that we are less busy because writing is dependent upon the rules and hours authors set for themselves.  If we all had offices away from the home, perhaps this misconception wouldn’t exist.  But because we prefer comfortable spaces (homes or coffee shops or cafes, or my favourite place of all, the couch) it’s perceived as, essentially, laziness.  Because I could be cleaning instead of typing.  I could be doing something active.  I could be going out to run errands.  Instead, I’m being sedentary.**  Some people believe writing is not a “real job” for all of these reasons.

Because this is my significant other, I had to set this straight.  I said, “Assume that whenever I’m staying home for the day, it is my designated ‘work on book’ day. It is not my ‘clean ALL THE THINGS’ day.”

And maybe, if I finish a chapter and feel like cleaning, I will clean.  But not before!

Mr. May, of course, apologized.  Because when people make comments like this, they don’t generally realize they’re speaking from this socially engrained idea that “work” equals “being active,” or that a “real job” requires “leaving the nest, staying out from 9-5.”***

So I’m clarifying this right here, right now.  Writing is work.  Writing is a job.  Writing is not for lazy people.  We don’t write because it’s easy.  That is not why we sit in front of a laptop or a blank sheet of paper for hours.  That is not why we spend years writing practice books that no one will ever read.  That is not why we spend all that time querying and getting rejections.  And that is certainly not why we write book after book.

Because we’re lazy?  No.  It’s because we’re compelled to.  It’s in our nature.  That is the only explanation for spending years writing unpublishable, crappy manuscripts to get to that point where our work is good enough to put out into the world.

So if you’ll excuse me, I will continue to sit on my couch and work.  Because this is how books are made.”

___________________________________

* Has anyone heard this? “I could write a book if I wanted!”

**  I’m being sedentary because I’m writing a damn book.

*** I’ve also heard the phrase used in reference to “non-career-like jobs” — the conceptualization of “real jobs” is limited to a few vocations, and let’s face it, it’s a shitty thing to tell anyone.  Right along the lines of “write a ‘real’ book” or “read a ‘real’ book.

How are you other fellow ROWers doing? You can visit them here.

by

Stacking The Shelves

Stacking The Shelves is a weekly meme hosted by Tynga @ Tyngasreviews. The idea is to showcase the books that we’ve recently won/bought. I have never felt the need to participate in such a meme, since until recently I had never won a book, and I shared the books I bought in my Book of the Week feature. But this month I have actually won/received books so I thought I’d share the news with you!

Won:

Wilde’s Army (Darkness Falls #2) by Krystal Wade via her website.

Look! It’s signed!

Received as a gift from the author:

Stolen Night (The Vampire Queen #2) by Rebecca Maizel.

Look! It’s signed too!

Bought while in the US

Something Strange and Deadly by Susan Dennard

Once (Eve #2) by Anna Carey

Underworld (Abandon #2) by Meg Cabot

Girl of Nightmares (Anna #2) by Kendare Blake

What did YOU add to your shelves this week?