This guest post appears here as part of the Drollerie Press Blog Tour.
Hi to Hamish’s readers, and thanks to Hamish for having me! I’m Angela Korra’ti, author of the urban fantasy ebook Faerie Blood, published through Drollerie Press. This is my contribution to the blog tour I’ve organized between Drollerie authors and several non-Drollerie authors, in the interests of getting the word out about Drollerie publications — and in exchange, to give other authors a chance to come visit our own sites and tell us about themselves. As an ebook author, I’m naturally interested in hearing about how other folks pursue non-traditional means of publishing. Since Hamish is a DIY author, I thought that’d be a nice fit for a swap of posts, and I look forward to checking out his work.
Meanwhile, I wanted to write about the overall topic of this blog tour, which is, best or worst experiences with works in progress. Those of us participating in the tour thought that’d be a nice icebreaker sort of topic, and that it’d be a good way to introduce folks to all of us.
I’m pleased to say that most of my experiences with works in progress so far have been pretty good. What leaps immediately to mind as the worst experience, though, is trying to get my novel Lament of the Dove started. I made the mistake of asking people for input on it before I got very far–and the feedback I received discouraged me enough that I backed off trying to actually finish it for some time. The lesson I took away from that is that for me as a writer, it’s much more effective to actually finish the first draft of the work and then ask for feedback on how to improve it.
More recently, my worst experiences have been more with not having the energy to work on my works in progress, rather than anything about the actual works themselves. The reason for this: breast cancer, in short, although I was very fortunate to have had the least severe case possible, caught very early. I didn’t have to have chemotherapy, but I did have radiation treatment, a mastectomy, and ultimately reconstruction surgery. And there was plenty enough stress involved to kick an enormous hole in my creative drive.
I’m still working on getting that back, and relearning the daily discipline required to get my works in progress back into actual progress. Best experience? Writing Faerie Blood, actually. I did that book during Nanowrimo in 2003, and I went in after a couple of weeks of sketching out notes on what I wanted to write about. It helped as well that I was throwing everything I loved into this book: music (Elvis Presley music and Newfoundland folk in particular), magic, elves, biking, computer geekery, cats, and Seattle. So writing it was pretty much a breeze. Getting it revised and queried and ultimately accepted for publication at Drollerie was a lot more difficult — but the writing, that was easy!
I’m hoping my next work will get me back to that.
Thanks for reading, all, and if you’d like to say hi and learn more about my work, come visit me at angelakorrati.com. You can learn more about my fellow Drollerie authors on Drollerie Press’s own site.
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