From the Forge…
Originally, I needed this Substack as a place to workshop fiction and hold myself accountable. I managed a year of serialized short fiction on here (which may be the longest I’ve ever stuck with anything) and connected with numerous other writers doing something similar. I got a little distracted after that first year as I limped into the 2nd Act of a novel.
Then something pretty amazing happened. I managed to get the first half of my novel in front of a literary agent. And I’m gonna be honest, part of me was waiting for the “this is great…how would you like to finish this, be represented, then get published?”. The pessimist in me was a little more “This is gonna be painful.” Turns out…it was a happy medium, which I would not have handled well had I not been submitting short stories for the last five years, receiving everything from stock denial emails to helpful feedback from editors. Turns out, my prose and dialogue were great, but I didn’t know how to structure a story.
I used the feedback as motivation and with the help of Chat-GPT, I created an MFA reading list for myself. Depending on my workday and the ads in Poets & Writers Magazine, my interest in an MFA waxes and wanes. I already had student loans from a graduate degree I no longer use (now forgiven…thanks PSLF) and with a background in higher ed., I do believe that you can attain the same knowledge by reading, doing, failing, and repeating. So I read all about how genre books are structured, used every supplemental resource I could find, and scrapped fifteen chapters of a poorly structured novel.
Then my doctor discovered an aneurysm near my heart and sent me to Vanderbilt where I had open-heart surgery two months shy of my 40th. I’ve since recovered, but was under the misconception that I would have all this free time to dedicate to reading and writing and completing all the things I’d taken for granted. While I had a ton of time, the body and mind have a weird way of diverting bandwidth away from the things you WANT to do and focusing on the thing you NEED to do…healing.
Regardless, here I am trying to get back into a writing routine and using Substack again to do so. I’ve decided to switch the format a bit, so I can still have my accountability partners, but without the pressure of churning out short stories every week. I’m a slow writer anyway (I started writing this post on Monday and planned to release it Wednesday morning) and this will allow me to share my novel progress, word count, resources, things I wrote, things I wish I wrote, successes, failures, etc. Starting next week, I’m gonna have this thing posted on Wednesday morning. Might add some graphics and headings. May explore some of these new Substack features. Same name though…even without serialized fiction. I love alliteration too much to change it.
