Tag: writing

Decision Time

So since I hate indecision more than anything, I’m making the decision that feels the most right for me right now.

I’m not going to work on another longform fiction manuscript until Looking for Home sells or I exhaust all avenues to get it traditionally published.

I’ve been trying to work on What Lies Ahead in fits and starts ever since the beginning of January after I got word that my deal for Looking for Home was cancelled. And that has been really painful and stressful for me. I’m sure you can imagine the stress–the primary thought that goes through my head at this point is WHY BOTHER?

I know all the very good reasons to bother writing–I enjoy it, it’s fun for me, I can’t know if it will be good or not until I actually write it, etc., etc.

But I also need to take care of myself and my own mental health. And right now, writing a longform fiction manuscript is neither enjoyable nor fun. I need to be in a place where I can regain my perspective on why I write and where I know that I am not hurting myself with my process or my words.

This is the pattern I took once I finished Hurricane Baby: Stories and started shopping it. I did not begin work rewriting Looking for Home until I got the offer from Madville Publishing for that first book. Currently Looking for Home has 12 rejections and is still out to 19 publishers, with plans to send to 10 more presses.

So we will see what happens.

I will continue to post here weekly about different thoughts on writing, my adventures in book events, craft articles, what it’s like being a debut author still, etc. I also have my Substack I also plan to continue posting on once a week about what helped make me a writer in the first place.

So I’m not stopping writing altogether. Just stepping back a bit. Please continue to visit and drop a note in the comments when you feel led with encouragement, questions, or requests for information about my upcoming schedule or my availability for any event. Thanks for understanding!

Keeping Records

I watched a college baseball game this weekend and marveled yet again at how absolutely every action on a baseball field is recorded and quantified for the record books–every ball, strike, error, hit, at-bat, catch–every movement has a statistic associated with it. It’s one of my favorite things about the sport–no action ever goes unnoticed.

(Did you know it’s possible to get no hits in a baseball game against the pitcher and still win? It’s happened once in MLB–on April 23, 1964, Ken Johnson of the Houston Colt .45s became the first pitcher to throw a nine-inning no-hitter and lose. In fact, he is still the only individual to throw an official nine-inning no-hitter and lose. The one run was scored on two fielding errors, a stolen base, one ground-out, and one fly-out.)

What does this have to do with writing?

I like to keep records of my writing life. I keep up with daily word count when I’m actively writing. I make lists of what scenes I want to revise when I need to work on a draft. I make lists of what presses I have sent manuscripts to and when and note when I hear back from them.

That tendency comes in handy for two reasons: 1) keeps me from going back over my tracks so I don’t send to the same publishing company twice, etc. and 2) gives me a sense of accomplishment in a trade that so rarely scratches the itch I have to feel like I am accomplishing ANYTHING.

I am wondering though if this recordkeeping is adding to my anxiety around writing, though. I try not to have word count goals, but I definitely set deadlines in my head to be at a certain point by a certain day on the calendar, etc. And I have definitely let myself get incredibly anxious about missing a self-imposed deadline or letting a few days go by without racking up words.

Anyone else have ideas or opinions around such quantifying of writing or any other creative endeavor? I am just trying to sort it out for myself but would appreciate others’ perspectives as well. Drop any insight into the comment section if you would–I’d appreciate it!

Happy writing!

2025 Numbers

GOOD NEWS!

I got my royalty statement for 2025 from Madville Publishing, and . . .

Hurricane Baby: Stories made some money last year, y’all!

I’m not going to get into exact numbers in this post, but sales were over what they were last year, and while I had returns, the number was lower than I expected. Miscellaneous sums for printing, etc. aside, I earned a chunk of change for the publisher, and my percentage of that was high enough that the publisher can actually cut me a check for it (which was not the case last year).

Do the royalties cover what’s been spent traveling to various events, publicizing said events, etc.? No. So as a total endeavor, I’m still not making any money. But the hole isn’t quite as big at this point.

But I still need to fulfill my pledge to the church to give them my first royalty check, since I didn’t get an advance for this book. I will gladly do that once I get the funds in my bank account.

A good day on the author front all around!

The Land of Ice

So we are just a little too far south in Mississippi for the ice storm as of right now. No telling what’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours, though.

I was envisioning myself shut up in the house with nothing to do.

Then I remembered the last time I was without power for an extended period–August 2005 after Hurricane Katrina blew through.

An idea for a story hit me a day or so after the impact.

I got out a pen and a spiral-bound notebook. I wrote a story of heartbreak, pain, and decisions with far-reaching consequences, created in longhand on real paper with real ink in moments between caring for my family and watching society crumble into exchanges of gunfire over the last bag of ice at the gas stations.

Those scribbles eventually became the opening story of my 2024 book, Hurricane Baby.

I still have pens, pencils, the ability to write in longhand, and over twenty empty paper journals people have given me over the past twenty years.

I’m going to be fine.

The 100 Men Hall in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi

I went and spoke at this venue this past Saturday–they have a writer-in-residence, Ellen Morris Prewitt, and a writers’ group that meets once a month there for three hours. So I talked about my publishing journey to Hurricane Baby, then we wrote for a while. After we did some reading of our writing, then I talked about setting a vision for writing, setting goals, making plans to meet those goals, and about how those words all mean slightly different processes that give us a roadmap for accomplishing what we want. Then we wrote more about that and wound up the session with sharing what we felt comfortable with about all of that.

I felt very good after the event. I had wondered if I would feel rusty after spending less time doing events after this past August. But I did my regular talks and read from the book for the first time in a while without any trouble. So that was a confidence-booster. And the organizers and writers were so kind and attentive and responsive. I appreciated that.

My next event is back on the Coast–I’m on a panel for Homegrown, the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s literary festival. I will be reading from Hurricane Baby and doing Q&A as far as I know right now. That’s on January 31 at the University of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Park campus. I’m looking forward to the energy of seeing so many folks I know for that event. I’m hanging in there. Hope you are, too. Happy writing!

Got Some Good News

Back in June of this year, I entered a chapbook contest. A chapbook is a very short work of prose or poetry, about 20-40 pages worth. I had put this chapbook together a while back, but when I saw this new contest, I revised my little five-story manuscript, retitled it, and sent it in.

Finally heard back last week–I’m not one of the finalists that was sent to the final judge, but I was in the group they selected the finalists from. That was encouraging!

So I think for the next little while I am going to make revising and submitting this chapbook around my next creative endeavor. I have a list of 12 outlets to send to, spaced out from now until September 2026. I can have something to work on while I try to sort out what I want to do next with my third book–do I want to continue to revise what I have, rewrite the whole thing from scratch, move on to another manuscript, or what. Give my overstimulated brain a little time to relax from creation.

Done with events this year, but I start right back up again in January 2026 with three speaking engagements. That’s good. Soon I’ll be getting cover designs for Looking for Home, and all of that excitement will be in motion. I feel good about this plan to submit while the planning for Looking for Home is going on.

Thanks to all of you for your continued support of my work and my stories!

Three Little Wins

I had a series of small votes of confidence the past two weeks, and I want to share them to show that sometimes it only takes a bit of encouragement to keep going.

I have been invited to speak at Mississippi State University on April 7, 2026, the school I got my BA and MA from. This invite was very exciting, but so was the information that came with it–I’m also going to meet with a creative writing class for a Q&A with graduate students. And they’re going to have read Hurricane Baby as part of the curriculum for the class.

My book will be a textbook for a writing class. I’ll be REQUIRED READING, y’all!

Second–my publisher put out a photo advertising the press’ books. It was labeled “Best of the Best” and captioned “Best Sellers”. And Hurricane Baby was in the shot! (I have no way of knowing if I’m really a best seller–but it looks good in my Facebook feed!)

Number three–I got an email congratulating me on my new book, and the writer said he looked forward to getting a copy and reading it so he could nominate it for the Mississippi Arts and Letters Fiction Award. I was stunned. I barely know this person–and he has this kind of belief in my work? AMAZING.

Like I said, small encouragements. And maybe I’m reading too much into them. But they helped me break through my imposter syndrome and actually write on my new work-in-progress. And that’s a big something for me.

Happy writing, y’all!

Literary Criticism

I was thinking a couple of days ago about my various experiences of writing, and my mind uncorked a long-buried memory from the back of my mind. I may not have all the details straight, but this is the gist of it:

I was in school (not sure what grade), and my class was given a homework assignment (or maybe extra credit)–to write a play about Paul Revere’s ride at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. This particular class was where I had fallen in love with history to the same degree that I was in love with writing, and now I had a chance to combine the two! I couldn’t pass this opportunity up.

I remember coming to the assignment with the utmost seriousness. I wanted it to be as accurate and honest as I could make it from the version of the story presented to me in my class history book–I populated the play with farmers, churchmen, soldiers, and Quakers. I had Paul Revere complaining to his horse about the weather and about being tired and about how he hoped he didn’t get saddle sore. I went all out.

So the due date came, and I turned in my play. I seem to remember only one other girl did a play as well. My teacher decided to have the class read both the plays and hold a vote for who the class thought had the best one. So she called on people to read mine aloud first, then the other girl’s.

The other girl had not taken the pains to be historically correct. The characters were all named after her friends in the class. The narrative didn’t have much to do with the American Revolution at all.

But the girl was popular. And she had name-checked most of the other people in the class. I had a sinking feeling as I heard the class talking among themselves how much they liked hers more then mine. I just sat in my desk and started at the floor. The teacher had us vote with a show of hands. I held up my hand for mine and didn’t even look up to see if anyone else did. The silly play won.

I was left with this takeaway: my play had lost because I was the one who wrote it.

Silly, yes. Naive, a bit. But anyone who has spent time in writing spaces has seen this happen before, even among grownups. Literary merit doesn’t always bring success to the creator.

However.

My mistake was to turn this incident into a flat statement about my abilities: That my work could never be “good enough” because I would never be “good enough” because I was too smart, too show-offish, too unattractive, too too too–whatever.

My work is as good as it needs to be. And the more I work, the better it will get with practice. And the more persistent I am, the more opportunity I can create for myself and my work. That’s the bottom line.

Candy-Store Problem

A candy-store problem is when you have a lot of choices, and all of them are good–or at least not bad.

I have four ideas for books–a paranormal novel, a double murder mystery with a twist, a father-son relationship novel, and a mother-daughters novel. I have been trying to work on the paranormal novel as it’s an old manuscript that would need to be rewritten, as is the double murder mystery. The other two are fully outlined from beginning to end.

The murder mystery feels the most like a conventional genre book and the most commercial. The paranormal one feels like another small press book with the twists and turns it takes. The other two feel more conventional as well.

When I set back out doing this, I decided I would rewrite the four older manuscripts first, querying indie and small presses for the first three (Hurricane Baby, Looking for Home, and the paranormal book) and query agents for the murder mystery to see if I could get a Big 5 deal. Then I’d write the other two from scratch and maybe be of age to retire if I wanted to or try to think up new ideas if I didn’t.

Now I am wondering whether that’s the proper path to take.

But at least my choices are all good because they all involve writing!

So please think about me in the next few weeks as I chew over my choices. Happy writing to you all!

Getting it Right

I’ve talked before about my mantra for writing, no matter what kind it is: get it right and tell the truth. Those can be slippery concepts for fiction. Nonfiction can be easier–depending on what it is you’re trying to tell the truth about, such as in memoir, where truth can often be an elusive concept.

I’ve not always been good at telling the truth in my life. But eventually I learned that lying burdens the brain because you’re always having to think harder to keep your story straight.

The other prong of it I got to thinking about recently as I did some neurological testing to see what might be causing my memory issues or if it was just normal aging. It turned out that I am functioning fine for someone my age. But the doctor did note some interesting findings–one of which was that during the testing, I emphasized doing a task correctly rather than doing it quickly.

Ah, here was a question with a clear answer from my life! I told him that was an easy one to solve; in school, I used to be the first one in class to finish tests, but I didn’t always make a perfect score. So my mom impressed on me that I only got credit for getting the right answers, not for turning the paper in quickly. So all my life, I’ve been oriented to getting right answers and doing something correctly rather than quickly.

Back in my day, some teachers would go over the answers to a test by calling on people who got the question incorrect to give their answer so the teacher could explain why their answer was wrong. The first time that happened to me, I wanted to sink down through the floor in shame. That experience stuck with me my whole life–so I try as much as possible to get the details right in whatever I’m writing.

All of this, of course, can stop creativity in its tracks. The trick I use is to write about what I know I can get right first–then fill in the blanks with research and expert opinion. At least that’s the goal.

How do you approach truth in writing? Let us know in the comments!