Aigner Loren Wilson Writer & Editor
Literary Speculative Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Games
I'm at this really interesting point in my career, where I don't want to miss anything, in a sense. I'm doing what I have always wanted to do: be a professionally published working writer who tells a good story well. Like I look back over the places I've published and worked with over the past few years and am pretty flabbergasted.
Entering year five of the blog (!!!) and with a lot of my history as a writer stored here, I'm always wondering how to change or update the blog to meet my life.
Monthly check-ins are easy to do, but year-end wrap-ups are hard. I write and publish a lot in various markets, so it's not as though I don't have links to share. It's just that when I look back over my year, the amount of stories I've sold and how much I've published is only a small part of my writing career. More happens behind the scenes than I think I will ever fully share.
Stories, stories, stories, and bread! But mostly story news about my novella, novelette, and short stories.
I write and edit ... a lot. It's my all-time everyday oxygen-blood. It is what fuels me. Yes, it's also my work, but writing is the thing I would do even if my career was in some other industry. Creating stories and thinking about them ARE the things I do instead of most other things. But it's also something that doesn't just happen.
Ending July with a bang and kicking off August with two more short story sales, novel query and submission news, and starting my August short story challenge.
On index cards sometimes just on a dry erase board or poster board, writers build a story just by its scenes. Instead of writing it out word by word, they draw or sketch it with images or words. Sometimes it'll just be something as simple as 'The Bad Man Dies' and some sketch of how the scene should look or take place.
I've been spending my time doing a lot of career planning and looking to the future. The question on my mind is: this time next year, where do I want to be? The answers I've been chewing on are the steps and moves I need to make to get to that dream writer-self by July 2023. I do this type of thinking/planning every year and whether or not I get the thing I want, I always end up in a better place than where I started with opportunities crawling out of the woodwork. But how do I build on that to make sure my career and craft are constantly growing?
One of my favorite steps in the writing, editing, and revising process is spreadsheeting my story. Spreadsheeting a novel is when a writer or editor takes a story and breaks it out into a spreadsheet summarizing the story on the scene level.
I feel like I've been heavy in this cavern of learning and consuming over the past month. I don't think I've made any big sales, though I did hear back about a story being held for further review. Bittersweet news. I hope the story gets accepted, but if it doesn't, it getting held means the story is doing something right.
Aigner Loren Wilson Writer & Editor 