I've Got The Fire Back!

Since Nanowrimo, I've been on a little hiatus. I edited all through December, but when January hit, I was in a slump. February didn't see an end to it. But here we are in March, and suddenly I have found my fire again.


Firstly, I have been working hard to maintain my blogs and website. I'm tweeting like a madwoman and writing ficlatte's while looking up writing contests. I have found a few that strike my fancy.


While puttering around on my blogs, I found my niche! That's a good thing because now I can try to market myself. I've been trying hard to do that for a while.



The one glitch in the system is that MailChimp and I have been fighting each other. Apparently, I need to build an email list to work on promotion. MailChimp is free, but not the most user-friendly. I have been trying to give out a free PDF and people aren't biting. I realized that the links are not working and the free stuff does NOT integrate with MailChimp. I even tried avoiding the PDF file altogether and just linking to a view only version on Google Docs and when I clicked on it from my test email, it failed.

Anyway, I'm reading , writing, and pushing forward after a rough start to 2018. I expect more hiccups to come, but for now, I'm enjoying the escalating ride up the hill. I hope it leads to an exhilarating ride.

Watering the Seeds to Grow Your Ideas

Today I was inspired by this phrase "Watering the Seeds". When you plant a seed, you have to water it to see it grow and produce fruit. As a gardener myself, I know that the watering and the weeding take the most time and there are some really hots days when I think about watering and go "ugh".

My actual garden in June. (It needs watered.)

What does this have to do with writing?

All writers get seed ideas. We sometimes plant them by jotting them down. (If you don't have a notebook where you jot down ideas, get one!) But they will never grow if we don't work on them.

Aha.

Watering your idea makes it grow. Tending to it, nurturing it, and adding to it turns it from a seed idea into a novel.

Outlining, researching, and then writing scenes and characters is sometimes exhausting. It takes perseverance to get to The End. Then comes editing, which can be even more daunting! But if you keep at it, you will end up with a story that bears fruit; that holds up against the tests of time, critique, and review.