Writerly Ways

I'm in the midst of editing my novella (due by tomorrow omg how?) so I'm keeping this short. My thought and goal for this year as it has been in others is authors helping authors. I have a lot of new people on the blog so I thought I'd put this out there.

Authors need to help each other (like I'm being helped with that author's panel). I am more than willing to help you. If you're having a sale or new release, let me know. I would be thrilled to let you do a guest blog post on my blogs (LGBT would probably better on Jana's social media as she has a much larger following for that market than the one under my actual name but I'm happy to put it both places).

If I see open calls that aren't like 5 minutes from being over (which SO many of them have been) I'll share them.

What I'd like in return right now is a heads up on anthology open calls if you stumble across any, especially for solarpunk, shifters or paranormal/urban fantasy. I have a few short stories I need to find homes for.

And oh, that sale I linked up to yesterday is still ongoing. I'm doing rather well I have to say. Not only are they picking up the 99 cent novel they are buying the other two novellas that go to that universe. Yay!

And now some writing links Hopefully I hadn't shared all of these before (Bookbaby is definitely recycling links at this point)

Things I Wish I Had Known Before Self-Publishing My Book

Words That Carry Maximum Weight: Tropes In Storytelling

The Importance of Setting In Your Story
I'm big on this one

Five Things You Need As You Begin A Career As A Self-Published Author

How To Read, Edit, and Evaluate Your Writing With Fresh Eyes

New Novelist? Plan Your 2019

Author Incomes: Not Great, Now or Then

Rest for Success & Why Busy is Seriously Overrated

Want Authorly Superpowers? Build a Street Team!

4 Things You Should Know Before You Quit Writing Your Novel

The Different Types of Editing Explained

Six Reasons the Fire Nation Is Such a Good Villain This is good!

Six Common Wordcraft Mistakes in Manuscripts guilty so guilty

PODCAST
204 – Bad Wordcraft Devices Soldiers of the Sun

Yearly word count -

1862 / 100000 words. 2% done!

To Steal from Chuck Wendig

Not to mention enemytosleep

Day 13- In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

My basic goal is 'to finish my shit.' I am TERRIBLE at finishing things. Name it and I suck at finishing it. I'm easily distracted and I'm on the lazy side. I didn't realize that I have as MANY Buffyverse fanfic left undone until I decided to start putting them on AO3. I knew I had a bad habit of it so when I went to Fullmetal Alchemist fandom I had started not putting stuff up as WIPs.

So here are my goals fannish and otherwise

1. Finish slowly putting up my Buffy fanfic on AO3 (I miss having sunnydalescribe to put them up every friday but I think that will be my goal. Once a week, I put up a story.

2. Finish one of my Buffyverse fanfics for wipbigbang if it runs again this year. I have three or four long ones that I would love to finish (and could use sounding board for them)

3. My only other fandom goal is to do fandom_stocking if it runs again this holiday coming (given how slow it's been to fill this year I wonder) and to do spook_me if it runs.

4. I can't do many fandom things anymore because I write professional and to that end I want to find homes for my finished short stories

5. At least submit Splinters of SIlver and Cold Iron somewhere (and I'm half hoping one of the fandomtrumpshate offerings is an Irish language picking because I would so bid on that for this)

6. Finish These Haunted Hills

7. Pick one of my damn nano novels, all left abandoned and work on them.

8. try to get healthier. I don't want to set any more definite goals there because I will feel the weight of them and rather than motivate me, it will push me to default on it.

9. find fun things to do. I work all day and then I work at writing at night (because to me it IS a second job) so I should find time to have fun.



And I HAVE finished one thing, the challenge aeris444 issued for Snowflake's Day 12. " Open your oldest WIP or second oldest and add 100 words to it!"


I chose Like Stone Which I just uncovered last week. Honestly I thought this was lost entirely. I knew I had a story where Connor was working with Kate and evil_little_dog insisted I had a story with a Labrador Retriever. Well this is it for both of those things. I also thought there was MORE of it. Anyhow this was written in 2003 right after Home I'm not sure any episode of anything EVER spurred me to write more than that. A dozen or more stories within the year. In this one Origins never happened (well most of S5 didn't happen since it was written before S5.

Connor has not forgiven Angel and is now a homicide detective in L.A. and is friends who Kate who is a PI. Dawn is in town trying to prove her missing friend was in fact murdered. This is just after Connor has asked her to the station to talk about it after a lead she gave him panned out and they found her friend's body.

Here's what I wrote tonight (345 words!)


Nearly midnight, not late by a Watcher’s standard but the hours with Connor and Nami had drained Dawn entirely. She hoped to slip into Buffy and Angel’s Victorian unseen but neither of them was out judging by the lights on in the window and the silhouettes she could see against the living room curtains. Buffy didn’t patrol like she used to but Angel did. Sighing, she let herself in with the spare key and walked directly into the living room. She might as well get this out of the way.

Buffy jumped off the couch. “Dawn! Are you all right?”

Dawn flopped into a chair. “Why wouldn’t I be, Buffy? I wasn’t a suspect. Connor and Nami had a ton of questions about Sean and all the notes I had made over the years.”

“Well how could I tell with the way he dragged you out of here.” Buffy sat down, obviously in a fury and probably had been since Dawn had left.

Dawn glanced at Angel who looked so withdrawn a turtle had nothing on him. Yes, Buffy was in rare form. “Connor didn’t drag me anywhere. I wanted to help. I already knew Maribel was dead, Buffy. That’s why I asked him to look into it. Yes, it was hard to have confirmation but I’ve been waiting for this day ever since she disappeared.”

Buffy’s shoulders slumped. “He looked so angry when you left.”

“I did hide half the truth from him, and your stunt with Lindsey really pissed him off, so kudos. Thanks for that.” Dawn rolled her eyes. “But it’s fine now. They have to wait to hear what the CSU team got from where Maribel had been walled up but it looks likely he’ll be able to arrest Sean soon. I was worried Sean would take his son and run but Connor assured me they had police watching the place to hopefully prevent that.”

“So, it worked out as well as something like this could,” Angel said, rubbing Buffy’s arm.

Tears pricked Dawn’s eyes and she dashed them away. “Yeah.”