Professional Writer & Editor
I love writing. It's my lifeblood or my heart pulse; it's the thing that keeps me going. Noodling over a writing problem or coming up with a new story feels like living to me. But when I'm doing it in a community of other writers, it feels like magic.
I'll be doing an AMA over on the sub r/PubTips this Friday, July 7, 2023, from 4 to 6pm PDT/7 to 9pm EDT! While my other AMA was all about fantasy writing, editing, and reading, this one is going to be all about short story writing, editing, selling, submitting, and all things short stories.
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.
Books, stories, anthologies, and more is what my 2023 intention and goals are all about. Last updated October 2023
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.
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.
August is my short story challenge month, where I attempt to write a short story (+1,500-words) every day. I wanted to share how I'm able to write a new story within an hour a majority of days.
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?
Help me pick a new blog post topic! With my workload and interest, I feel like the whole 'What I'm Consuming' blog post doesn't really align with the work I want to spend my time on. I've been kicking around the idea of what to use this week for and have come up with nothing.
Aigner Loren Wilson 