Tag: writing

This Year’s Mississippi Book Festival

Before I started writing today about the Mississippi Book Festival, I went back and reread my experience with the event last year. I didn’t know it when I wrote then, but I was only a month away from getting the offer to publish Hurricane Baby from Madville Press. I read it and I can feel the longing and hope in the words that someday I would attend as an official panelist and get a peek behind the curtain of what being a published writer might look like.

And yesterday I found out.

I was proud to be selected as a member of the panel “Mad About Madville” with the other two Mississippi writers Madville Publishing had released books from this summer, Steve Yates and R. J. Lee. Our moderator was Darden North, a local MD who writes medical thrillers along his professional career. Our panel was mid-afternoon and had about fifteen attending–the big draw of the Festival across the street was LEVAR BURTON and JESMYN WARD in conversation; that was some tough competition. But we all three got to discuss our books for an hour and that was just the best feeling ever.

We had the opportunity to sign books that people bought at the event, and I had one young lady come up and ask me to sign her copy of my book. But it was special in that I didn’t know her; she didn’t know me; she had just somehow heard about the book or picked it up out of curiosity and wanted to read it. That was so touching to me and made my day.

It was strange being on the other side. I got to visit author-only hospitality areas; I got to meet several authors I knew only by reputation. I felt every once in a while the felling that you know, being part of this is AMAZING.

The rest of the month is slow for me as far as events are concerned. I hope to catch up at work and on my work-in-progress with some fresh inspiration from the Festival. Happy reading to all!

Of Two Minds

I am realizing that I might need to take a break from my work-in-progress, Looking for Home. I’m in the last third of the book, and I suddenly just dread sitting down, opening it, and writing. There’s a multitude of reasons why I could be stuck–the other two sections were more drafted, while this one is not. The events in this section are hard scenes to write. The character goes from a teenager to a battered wife and on and on. I don’t think I have a handle on the main character in this section.

What I do know is I feel bored with it. And if I’m bored writing it, you’d be bored reading.

But there’s a really good argument to be made for keeping on. I only have a few chapters left before I have a full draft. You can’t edit and refine what you haven’t written yet. The discipline is the key–if you keep showing up for yourself, eventually you’ll break through. Always finish projects, Neil Gaiman said. You have to keep your forward momentum going. I felt this way close to the end of Hurricane Baby and pushed through because I had something to prove.

And that’s all very true, too.

But I no longer have anything to prove right now.

I do know I’m about to go through a time with my book launch where my mind will be distracted. I want so much to enjoy this time upcoming. Maybe making working on LFH only a sometime thing after going through the whirlwind of events with my launch.

Ill have to think some more. Any advice, drop it in the comments!

Break

I took an involuntary break from writing on my work-in-progress since my oldest daughter and her son came up here from Florida. I decided that spending time with them was more important. So that’s what I’ve been doing the past two weeks.

It’s not been wasted time. I’ve thought about the manuscript every day. I decided I’m going to play Merrilyn as a woman who knows what she wants but has to find sneaky ways to get it because of the volatility of the people around her. And that affects her by making her a volatile person, too. The idea is to take the Merrilyn of the first section of the book and move her to be the Merrilyn of the third section. That’s going to take some heavy lifting.

So I suppose I need to get back to work at some point, and it may as well be now. ‘Til we meet again!

What to Do When You Don’t Have Anything to Say

Just start typing. “I don’t have anything to say today. I wish I did but I don’t, I don’t understand why but the words just aren’t coming. Mabye I’m tired. Maybe I’m burnt out. Maybe I’m still thinking about the things where what my husband said made me feel some kind of way.”

Do you see what’s happening here? I’m problem-solving as I go. I’m sorting out solutions or answers or suggestions for what might be the root cause of the situation of not having anything to say.

Or you could get more specific–“Why am I having so much trouble writing from Merrilyn’s point of view. Is it that I don’t know her very well yet? Is it that I’m unclear on what needs to happen in this section to get from point A to B to C, etc.? is it because she’s never had a voice before, and she needs to assert herself–and that’s something you’ve always had trouble doing in your own life? Do you feel like she can’t assert herself because you have always had the same problem?”

Now I’m getting somewhere. Maybe if I just sit down and just write out what all happens to her in a rush, covering incidents from the next eight years of her life. Then I can fill in the details on another rewrite.

Just start typing and see what you have to say.

Bits of Good News

Two more bits of good news have come in for Hurricane Baby–my signing at my local bookstore may have been turned into a conversation about another writer Q&A format. I think it will be cool if we can pull it off.

And a bookseller back at my old stomping grounds at college finally got back in touch with me and agreed to hold a signing event the day after I had my reading in my hometown. So soon I will need to start publicizing that.

My work-in-progress in kid of in freeze frame. I don’t know what’s really holding me back from writing it the way I want to. I just don’t know Merrilyn well enough yet. I need to work on that. I certainly don’t think I’m going to hit that August deadline–but then again, I might. You never know. I may sit down one night and just type my heart out. It might not be right for the book, but at least it will be something to deal with.

We will see. Have a good afternoon!

New Podcast Episode

Soa few days ago I sat down with Shannon Evans, host of Tombigbee Tales, a podcast originating out of the Columbus MS area. We talked about how I got into writing, how I wrote Hurricane Baby, and how I wound up selling it to my publisher. So it was a good conversation in my head.

The tape told a little bit different story. I waited too long to answer questions, I used filler words like “um”, and I didn’t let the host set up the pace of the interview. Good points: I answered every question fully, and I wasn’t boring in telling my stories. So now I know what to continue to work on in future interviews–being quicker on the uptake with questions and speaking with authority.

So we will see how the next one goes! Here’s the link to last week’s podcast if you want to give it a listen:

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-jmfs3-163fdc4

Progress!

If you remember, my current work-in-progress is a set of three novellas that tell a story of a young couple giving up a baby for adoption in the 1970s and the child finding them in the mid-80s. The final novella from the point of view of the adopted child, had been published in a novella collection, and the rights have reverted back to me, and I’ve been developing into a longer work. I started with revising the section that had already been published into something with more weight to it.

After i completed that section, I started on the first section, narrated by the birth father of his moving to Counce, Tennessee and meeting his girlfriend and how their relationship developed. I still had the original novel written in 2006 that I chopped down into the novella in 2017. I pulled flashback scenes from the novel to set up this first section and wrote more material about his life and . . .

Last night I finished the first draft of that section!

So tomorrow I will start on the middle section from the birth mom’s point of view about the years after giving up her daughter. And I have only a handful of half-bakes ideas for this part–I’ll be drafting almost from scratch. So that’s going to be. . . interesting. Definitely stretching my storytelling chops. I hope to finish it before Hurricane Baby publishes in late August this year.

So that’s my new goal. Wish me well!

New Opportunity

So we have our first festival invitation! The Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge, Louisiana has invited me to be on a panel and will have my books available for the sale tent at the event in November 2024. So that was a nice surprise when I got the message.

I am still holding out hope for the Mississippi Book Festival in September 2024. It’s only a few weeks after my book launch, which is now about two months away. But it’s not unusual for them to finalize their author list at the last minute, so I still have time to wait.

My work-in-progress is getting more manageable! I have two half-chapters and a set of scenes that aren’t connected together yet. I will figure them out. Maybe I will finish this section before the end of the month. Then I have the whole middle to write (from scratch!) That’s too terrifying to think about right now, though.

I did a very rewarding this yesterday–I talked via Zoom to students from my former MFA program about my journey to publication, along with two other alumni who are publishing books–Karol Lagodski and Lauren Rhoades. We just talked about pushing through and persevering and not giving up, sprinkled in with some practical advice along the way. It was so good to see everyone that runs the program and to meet the new faces as well. I hope I can do more of those kind of talks in the future.

I guess that’s all my news for today! Wishing everyone well!

In the Writing Trenches

I have been letting my work-in-progress, Looking for Home, absolutely kick my fanny the past two months. I started off with a good bit of material that I had pulled out of the older manuscript, and I had one chapter where I could see it absolutely play out like a movie with some filling in.

Then I decided to write the opening chapter and I froze up solid for the better part of a month and a half. I couldn’t figure out how to start it and get in the backstory needed and get into the action, too. I wrote five pages that I knew shouldn’t be the beginning, but I couldn’t think of how else to do it. It had Carlton with his family making the road trip moving from Pass Christian, Mississippi to Counce, Tennesse. After I finished the trip, I cut those first pages and started with the ending scene and wrote 13 new pages to get to an existing three-page scene I already had.

I think those were the hardest 16 pages of my life to date. I was working in the consciousness of a sixteen-year-old boy who’d lost his mama a few months before, and that was foreign territory, to say the least. Trying to get him settled into the world he’d been thrown into and him not doing such a very good job with it. I’m doing one thing a little differently; I’ll have scenes that come in my head, and I know they need to be in the story. But I have no idea where they’ll go. That’s the fun part of it all I suppose.

So that’s why you haven’t been hearing much about the work-in-progress–It’s been absoluely refusing to cooperate. Until now. Maybe I can get the next chapter wrestled to the ground. Until next time . . .