Author Life Updates: June and July 2023

Life Update: Took time away to care for my partner to care for them during their top surgery prep and recovery. They have healed up well, and we’re back on our walking in the woods bullshit! I also went on my first overnight offroading trail run with my forester, the Green Ranger.

Author Life News

I think the biggest thing that June and July brought was the Ignyte Award Voting and finalist announcements. If you haven’t heard me shouting and screaming about it, this author, me, right here, is a finalist for the Ignyte Awards in two categories! I’m up for best novelette and best critic. I won’t go into it too much here because I feel like I’ve already said so much about it.

I won’t know the results until the fall, but being nominated is already like winning, honestly. I’ll also get a cool token for being a finalist that I can carry, hold, and cherish always! In July, the Hugo Award nominations were also released, and Strange Horizons is up for best semi-pro magazine. There is a lot of awfulness surrounding the Hugos and Worldcon, like where it’s being held and the guest of honor. I won’t be attending, but I am still really proud of the Strange Horizons‘s team and all the work we do for the speculative fiction community.

I’ve also decided to start a newsletter again. This time I’ll be hosting it through Substack with some paid and free content. It’ll all be excerpts from my personal writing journals where I reflect about things I’ve read, do writing exercises, and journal about my life and intentions as an author. My hope is that the newsletter will be a way for people to connect with me on a deeper level who want to know less about my goings on as a writer and more about how I view the world around me as a writer.

You can subscribe and check out my newsletter, Writing Skins, here. But if you already are an email subscribed to this blog or to my previous newsletter, you were automatically migrated over to the new newsletter. I’d love it if you subscribed if you are not a subscriber, though! It will offer a totally different look at my process and writing life I’ve yet to share. I think for people who enjoy this blog, Writing Skins will be a refreshing and captivating addition to learning about me, my craft, and process.

June and July had genre blending in my mind a lot. I’ve got an article coming out from Writer’s Digest on how to revise a genre blended novel and spent some time revisiting some of my favorite blended novels like The Islanders and She Who Became the Sun. Honestly, that’s the first hard article I’ve had to write for WD, and I write a lot for them. This article was just something far outside my normal tutorials and a bit more in-depth, I think, than what I normally write. I hope readers get a lot out of it when it comes out!

If you haven’t already checked out my post about my setting and description reading list, you can check it out here. I spent the last couple of months, building out the list and grabbing copies of the books to begin reading. I have about 15 or so books to read through and analyze. I’m half-way through the books and have learned a lot!

Like with everything I learn, I’ve been doing two things: reflecting on it and exercising it.

I do my reflections in my journal while reading and practice what I’ve picked up in the stories I write. From the outside, I think the way people would judge whether or not a writer has learned a certain technique is through sales. But on the inside, it’s very different. The way I judge whether or not I’ve digested a writing lesson or technique is by judging how it hits my readers.

And by readers, I mean my critique group. It’s a safe place for me to present my earlier drafts or story exercises and get a feel on if what I am setting out to do is being accomplished. Whenever I come up with a story that I hope to sell, I put it through the ringer of the group. I have a few stories actually on deck to share with my group. I’ve talked a little about my short stories about chainsaw monsters and killer forests, but I’ve finally worked both into shape enough to share them with the group and get some feedback.

Another huge thing that happened over the past couple of months were my AMAs on Reddit. I did one on fantasy writing and editing over on r/fantasy and another one on short story writing, editing, and submitting on r/pubtips. Both were great events that helped me get an idea of how I can help writers around me and what is most interesting to readers.

I’ll be doing more AMAs in the future, but not for a few months while I focus on my research and plotting of my next book. I’ve so far finished writing the main character’s plotline, the killer’s plotline, and the lover’s plotline. The only plotline left to do is the secret plotline, which I’ll be working on in August. Along with working on the plotlines, I’ve been doing a lot of character building and research planning.

I want to take a research trip out to Nevada where the story is set and visit the town the setting is based on. I also want to chart the journey that the main character takes and journal about the process to help the writing. I also want to dive into the hobbies and lives of my characters to get in their minds more. It’s taken me down some dark paths, but all of it has turned up something useful I want to bring back to my story.