25 January, 2014

Beginnings

I just sold my first short story. Yay! My Little Red Riding Hood retelling will be coming out in April with Torquere Press in their Torqued Tales Anthology. It is titled "The Wolf in the Woods".

I am very excited about this and I decided to start a blog. I figured I should have some sort of website anyway since I intend for this to be the first thing I publish, not the only thing. I'm not sure how good I'll be at keeping up with a blog. We'll see how this goes. I think it'll be fun though to have somewhere to talk about my writing. I'll probably also post about books I've read. Possibly about knitting. And the cats. I'll definitely talk about the 2014 RWA conference in San Antonio this July. I'm super excited to be going to that. I might also throw random words at you sometimes. I apologize in advance for my lack of commas. Hubby always adds commas to my works when he edits them.

After not writing anything for months last year (due to depression) I decided to start small and submit some short stories to various anthology open calls. It doesn't hurt that I find writing short stories a lot of fun. Fairy tale retellings can be a lot of fun and Little Red Riding Hood was the first one I thought of. Let's face it. I'm sure it has a lot to do with Teen Wolf and my love of Derek/Stiles and the staggering amount of fanfic I've read for them.

I only managed a few paragraphs of this story the first time I managed to sit down and write it. I use the NaNoWriMo method for all of my writing. I write a crappy first draft without editing it at all. Sometimes a first draft is just too crappy to keep going with. Sometimes a first draft is so crappy you get blocked and can't do anything more with it. Those few paragraphs were enough for me to want to scrap this story completely. Instead, because I can be horribly stubborn when I want to be, I started over and wrote a full first draft.

My other method of writing seems to be different than most authors. At least it feels that way. I always see authors that talk about having to cut so much stuff from their stories. I, on the other hand, always write the bare bones of the story in that first draft. Revising is when I add in details and flesh out scenes.

I'm glad I didn't give up on this story, and not just because it was accepted. I'm happy with the way it turned out. I think it's a cute little story.

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