Books I Read in 2015 That Helped Me Along My Writing Journey

I read a lot of great books this year. I used to read around fifty books a year but once I became pregnant with my daughter, I realized it was highly unlikely I would make it through that many (though I have read a lot more board books), especially since I was also finishing my Masters at the time. So I decided to aim for at least twenty-five. For the last two years, I’ve managed to hit that number fairly easily. This year, I actually managed to read 30 books, as well as a whole lot of articles on educational leadership. I also read some great books that helped me with my writing. I’ve decided to list them here for you, in case you’re interested in reading some as well.

Publishing for Profit – Successful Bottom Line Management for Book Publishers, 5th Edition – Thomas Woll

Being someone who writes purely for the love of it, this title made me a little uncomfortable, but title aside—it was a great book. For the last two years I’ve contemplated taking the Certificate in Publishing program at Ryerson University as a way to keep myself learning about the publishing industry in some kind of structured way. But deciding to pursue my doctorate, working, writing and raising my daughter puts some severe limitations on my time. Plus, I’ve learned a lot from just jumping in and doing things. Once I realized it was highly unlikely I’d be able to take the program, I decided to check out which course materials they were using and found this book in their Intro/Foundational course, so I ordered it.

It was very informative and definitely gave me a glimpse into the publishing industry from a certain perspective and since I decided to start my own publishing company, a lot of the information helped me to see what I needed to do. There were a lot of tools in the book that I found useful for organizing my own company, like templates for contracts, profit and loss statements, editorial plans, marketing plans, and sample job descriptions. Reading this book helped me to write a business plan, an editorial plan, and a marketing plan (though I had to readjust them all later to make them simpler for my needs). One thing the book did not really address though was independent publishing. So for that, I turned to other sources—some of which shared similar information and in a far more relatable context.

Discoverability: A WMG Writer’s Guide – Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I love Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog. I can’t even remember how I stumbled across her but I think it was from reading about Hugh Howey and then reading the Passive Guy’s website and seeing one of his comments about how he’d never read anyone with the unique long-term perspective that Kristine has about the publishing industry. Once I found her blog, I slowly read my way through all of her articles and because I appreciate how willing she is to share information with new writers, I began to buy her books as well. This was a great one that has to do with Discoverability. Definitely a book I would recommend for any independent writer. Also, her blog is awesome. This blog in particular, Writing By Committee, couldn’t have come at a better time for me—I was experiencing doubt and wanting validation, instead of writing out of love and sharing what I wrote with the world as a way of learning and improving. After I read this, I got back to work writing the stories I most wanted to tell.

Killing The Top Ten Sacred Cows of Traditional Publishing & Indie Publishing (Two Separate Books) – Dean Wesley Smith

Kristine’s husband is Dean Wesley Smith and his Sacred Cow books provide really unique insight into the publishing industry as a whole. The purpose of them is to address myths that plague writers and empower them to make more informed decisions about their writing and writing careers. There is a ton of practical wisdom shared in these books and multiple light bulbs went off in my head as I read them. When I talk about different books approaching the same cogs and wheels of the industry in a more straightforward and relatable way—I’m talking about books like this. Dean and Kristine both have a lot of knowledge about traditional, indie and hybrid publishing and it shows in how they’re able to break down publishing trends. I particularly enjoy when Dean talks about the historical aspects of publishing, how the industry evolved over time and how that evolution impacted everything from the price of books to the size of them. Compelling stuff. I’m hoping to take one of their online workshops in 2016.

Rivet Your Readers With Deep Point of View – Jill Elizabeth Nelson

I picked this book up on the advice of an editor I worked with in early 2015. It was a good read and provided some valuable exercises that helped me think about how to dig deeper to find unique and compelling ways of writing. I read this book every now and again to remind myself to do more showing than telling. Definitely recommended.

The Emotional Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression – Angela Ackerman, Becca Puglisi

One thing I did in 2015 was create an Evernote document where I listed various emotions and then listed various ways to show or describe a character feeling or expressing those emotions in unique ways. It became a super valuable note to me as I was doing rewrites. This book is similar to my Evernote (definitely more comprehensive than my Evernote is at this point) in that it aims to provide a list of physical signals, internal sensations and mental responses people experience from different emotions.

This is another one of those books that helps me dig deeper during a second draft if I’m stuck or need to find a way to show instead of tell. I can have a look at a particular emotion, check back through my Evernote for something I can modify and/or create something new. So in that way, it’s a bit like a prompt—just for description instead of story.

So that’s it! In 2016, I plan to read some more, including this one (recommended at the back of Rivet Your Reader With Deep Point of View), The Definitive Book of Body Language. I read a ton of other blogs and listened to podcasts that were really great and helpful as well, but perhaps I’ll talk about those in a different post.

What about you? Did you read any books this year that helped you with your writing? Do you have any lined up for 2016?

Please feel free to share and as always, happy writing!
S. 

2015 Year in Review

I've seen a lot of people posting their 2015 Year In Review and Goals for 2016 and I've been loving reading them. I do this for my job but have never done it for my writing/creative/personal life, which is strange, because I've honestly learned so much and had such a great time doing it the last few years. Plus it's definitely nice to be able to look back on the year and see all of the amazing things that have happened. I'm very grateful for all of the wonderful things that took place these last twelve months. So here goes, my first ever year in review! 

My 2015:

Writing

1.     I wrote a MG book called The School That Ate Children. 

2.     I wrote another book called The Skeleton Key. 

3.     I hired a developmental editor. (I likely won't do this again but I learned so much from the process that I really would recommend it). 

4.     I hired a copy editor. (Two actually. Definitely, a must). 

5.     I went back to work from maternity leave & managed to keep writing consistently. 

6.     I learned how to make book covers using Photoshop & InDesign. 

7.     I formatted a book using a template by the Book Designer. (Seriously - so helpful). 

8.     I wrote a story that zapped me of creativity & learned to bounce back. 

9.     I added a Stories section to my website. (I'll be adding a Books section in 2016). 

10.  I presented on my short story collection at the 2015 Annual Indigenous and American Studies Storyteller's Conference. 

11.   I read 30 books! 

12.  I got two books formatted as ebooks by the lovely Streetlight Graphics. 

Personal/Creative

1.     My baby turned 1! (She's a year and a half now). 

2.     I got married!

3.     I finished my Masters!

4.     I started my Education Doctorate.

5.     I wrote 5 piano songs.

6.     I made a lot more art.

7.     The language degree I had been working on was approved.

8.     I started building a house.

Oh, and I also started a Wattpad page. I plan to post a lot more to it in 2016. If you're on there too—let me know and I'll find you. All in all, I'm really happy & grateful about how this year went. Since 2013, I've had some really broad goals for what I hoped to achieve each year. They are:

Write. Read. Draw. Play Piano. Write music. Sew. Imagine. Blog. Journal. Care. Tell Stories. Speak. Laugh. Smile. Let Go. Eat Well. Exercise. Drink Water. Listen. Hear. Learn. Excite. Educate. Advocate. Encourage.

Even though these are broad, they really helped me to focus my hopes and dreams these last few years and brought me to the point of being ready to publish my work. And this is a big part of why I am so excited for 2016. I spent the last half of 2015 getting books ready for publishing, so for me, 2016 will be as much about sharing stories as it will be about writing new ones. I can't wait to dive in!

Hope you all had a great year and wishing you an awesome 2016! Happy writing! 

S. 

The 7/7/7 Snippet Challenge!

A fellow writing challenge participant shared this cool challenge with me earlier today but I didn’t have a chance to get around to it until just now. (I’ve been playing Hyrule Warriors with my niece for the last three hours).

The challenge is pretty simple:

·      Go to the 7th page of your work-in-progress

·      Scroll down 7 lines

·      Share the next 7 lines of your work-in-progress in a blog post

·      Tag 7 other writers (with blogs) to continue the challenge

Some of the writers tagged in my round of the challenge were unable to participate as their works-in-progress were sequels to their first books and would include major Book One spoilers. This was the case with my work as well, so I decided to jump to another book I recently finished editing that I plan to publish in 2016. It’s called The Fortune Teller’s Daughter.

I love this book. It was the second book I wrote during the Writing Challenge and I learned a lot from (and since) writing it. When I first met the characters in this novel and started to discover their stories, I had no idea how I was ever going to capture it all—it was an enormous tale. And so, I’ve had to tackle it bit by bit. This scene features my protagonist, Cora Solomon, and occurs the moment her life is forever changed.

She bounded up the stairs to her house and stepped inside.

“I’m home!”  She closed the door behind her. “I can’t believe you missed—”

Her sentence died on her lips. Her backpack slid out of her hand and onto the floor.

Chairs were overturned and lie on their sides. Stuffing littered the floor in front of the sofa. Cushions were torn open and tossed aside. All the books on the bookshelf had been ripped out and now lay in a heap next to the television. A fire poker lay abandoned on the tile next to a dark puddle…

Clearly—something very terrible happened to our poor little Cora. That’s a sample sketch I drew of her sometime back at the top of the blog, by the way :). It was super hard to pick which book I ought to use for this challenge. I had another work-in-progress that I started last summer but had to step away from to start editing the four or five books I’d finished. I think this is the book I’m actually going to start writing again in 2016. It was a fun story. I called it The Harvester War. I have no idea where it was going, but it’ll be neat to pick it up again. I’m sharing here just for fun. (I’m not even kidding—I have no idea where I was going with this story, lol).  

Her eyes swirled like clouds of grey. She wore a sword across her front and when she pulled it from its scabbard—he saw that it shone with golden light. He would have recognized it anywhere, though he’d only heard of it in stories. It was sunstone. The strongest metal in the known universe, mined in the City of Ithaca. Very few had successfully shaped it into weapons, which told him that this girl was a Solomon, one of the Guardians of the Seven Portals.

The soldier raised his gun and pointed it at her.

“No!” Brady shouted.

 

Weird, huh? Did she live? Did she get shot? Did Brady dive in front of her? I guess I’ll have to keep writing to find out.

Happy writing everyone!

S. 

Holiday Blog

The holidays are finally here and I’m so excited to spend the next two weeks being creative! The last six months have been a flurry of activity between school and work and family. Although I often think it would be awesome to be a full-time writer, I really enjoy my job and just before the holidays started, we received some very wonderful news. I work for an Indigenous postsecondary education institute called Six Nations Polytechnic. For the last three years, one of my projects was to work with language instructors and people in my community to develop a language degree for Cayuga and Mohawk. And just before the holidays started, we got word that our application had been approved! As some of you know, I’m very passionate about languages and trying to become a better speaker. The degree is definitely only one small piece of many excellent efforts happening to revitalize Haudenosaunee languages but it’s a cool part and one I was happy to be apart of. So yes, awesome stuff is happening at work and I’m glad to be there—even if my greatest passion is storytelling.

Back in July, I wrote a blog where I was talking about all of this writing I’d done that I wanted to get into a publishable state by the end of the year. You see, joining the #MonthlyWritingChallenge and writing 500 words a day turned out to be a completely transformative experience for me. (I actually started out writing 300 words a day after reading this interview with Stephen King by Neil Gaiman and then I stumbled onto the Writing Challenge and the rest is history). Suddenly, I had all of these drafts of stories. Unfortunately, it started to become too much pressure to keep writing when I knew I had these half-finished drafts waiting to be polished. I knew I had to finish them and get them ready to publish.

As I’ve gotten closer to the end of the year, I thought it would be a good idea to take stock of whether or not I accomplished what I set out to do in July. Happily, I can share that I have four books that are for the most part ready to go. Yay!

·      Spirit & Intent: A Collection of Short Stories & Other Writings (Being formatted as an ebook)

·      The Vampire Skeleton (Ready to go!)

·      The School That Ate Children; and (With a copyeditor)

·      The Fortune Teller’s Daughter (Headed for copyedits in January)

So I’m super excited for the holidays because I can do more things—especially on the business/admin side—to get my books ready for sharing. For example, there’s some confusion about the process for registering tax information on Createspace for authors who reside in Canada (to avoid paying taxes for royalties twice). In a way, this is somewhat more complicated for Indigenous authors. Complicated might not be the right word—maybe it’s just strange because our rights and responsibilities are not very well understood by mainstream business practices and nowhere is that more evident than in these kinds of situations. Anyways, hopefully, I can figure things like this out over the next few days.

Also, just minutes ago, I finished prepping my YA fantasy book, The Fortune Teller’s Daughter for copyediting, which means tomorrow I can get started on a second round of edits for The Skeleton Key—a book I wrote back in the summer. But it’d also be nice to finish the script for a comic I started writing in the summer as well. Whichever project I choose, I know it’s going to be a great way to spend my break! 

The first two books in the list above will be published in January 2016. The other two will likely be published in April 2016, if not sooner. I'm very excited, because it means I can finally start writing something new. Which begs the question (at least for me) what have I been doing for the last six months, if not writing new stories? The quick answer is editing, formatting, designing covers, reading about the industry, setting up accounts with online retailers and otherwise navigating how complicated this can all be. What’s been great is that there are so many resources out there that are helpful. I’ve read a lot of blogs and watched a lot of videos that helped shine some light on virtually every part of the process and I plan to write a blog that gathers together all of my favourites in one place for my own reference (since it gets tricky finding everything in my ever expanding Reading List) and also, to share with anyone else who might be looking for information.

Til then, I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season with your family and loved ones!

Happy writing!
S 

Countdown to Launch

Hello everyone! It's so great to be returning to the blog. So much has happened in the last four months, it's hard to know where to begin! I got married. I learned to format my own books. I learned how to make book covers using Photoshop and InDesign. I started an education doctorate program that is very interesting, but strange because it’s mostly online and I find myself missing the interaction of a classroom setting and also because its strange to be graded for online interactions (forum postings, etc.).

Now don't get me wrong, I love online forums. In fact, when I first started to actively use the internet, it was forums that really made it magical for me. I was constantly on the Song of Ice and Fire and Mugglenet discussion forums. I loved hearing other people's theories and ideas, finding that they took me even deeper inside of the books. I wasn't much of a poster—I preferred to read and think about what I was reading, but it was awesome to know there were so many people out there as actively engaged in the books as I was and that I had a way of being able to connect with them. There weren't a lot of fantasy or Game of Thrones readers in my life back then either, and even now with the show being as popular as it is, I still don't have too many friends as excited for The Winds of Winter book as I am. Which is totally fine, because there are tons of people excited on the forum! But it does make it difficult for me to go from loving forums as a way to connect to people with shared interests, to having a forum be a place where I must engage in dialogue for a percentage of a grade. I get it, and I’m grateful that these new forms of communication and technology are being incorporated into our program, but it’s such a different space to be writing in.

Then, towards the end of the summer I went through a period of horribly uninspired writing that I’m still recovering from. It was awful. I had followed an idea almost to the very end when I realized I was absolutely not interested whatsoever in writing the book I was writing and was only doing it so I would be writing new words every day, instead of editing the projects I had finished and enjoyed writing to the point of being publication-ready. I don't know why I did it. It was like I'd created this self-imposed expectation on myself to write something, anything so long as it was new, instead of letting myself take a break. I don't know if anyone’s had a similar experience, but doing this was really damaging for my creative spirit. I've heard other writers talk about this before, about only writing the projects that you’re on fire for, and all I can say is that I agree one hundred thousand percent. I didn't think it would hurt me to not work on something that was a startling, new idea. I thought it would help me to rest, rather than douse, my creative energy. I was wrong. Really wrong. And now, I am doing my best to rebuild my creative stores. It's slow work, but it's happening.

This whole experience helped me to see that I needed to finish certain projects so I could genuinely embrace new ones. So I took time off from writing in October and parts of November to edit and format my books using InDesign, which means, I am this close *squeezes fingers together* to launching my very small publishing company and publishing the first two titles in the series, to be followed shortly thereafter by other works.

This is the ideal publication schedule for the next 3-12 months:

Spirit & Intent: A Collection of Short Stories & Other Writings

The Vampire Skeleton

The School That Ate Children

The Fortune Teller's Daughter

The Skeleton Key

I'm ridiculously excited about all of this. As I've written before—for the most part—my books are inspired by themes and events in Haudenosaunee stories and most of them have magic in them. Over the last year, I've gone back and forth many times about whether or not it would be best for me to try and pursue a traditional publishing path or to independently publish. This last month really cemented it for me, though. The truth is—I absolutely love every part of the publishing process. As frustrating and time-consuming as it was, I loved learning to figure out formatting. I loved making various sample covers and figuring out what works and what doesn't. I loved studying other books covers and examining how stories I loved with older covers had been rebranded for a modern audience. I loved ordering proofs and assigning ISBNs. I loved learning how to make ISBN barcodes (thank you again, generous and wonderful independent authors for sharing your knowledge).

Which meant I realized that while a traditional publishing company might have more luck reaching a wider audience than I would on my own—I couldn't give up all of this love for what is truly, the very technical parts of the process. It's been far too long since an entire day disappeared just because I was caught up in trying to figure out how to renumber pages properly. The only other kind of work that makes me feel joy like this is writing itself.

So I'm going to pay attention to that. I've often heard it said that when time starts to disappear on you—that's when you know you’re doing your passion. No one's paying you to do it. There's no reward or grade to mark your accomplishment. You simply do it because you love it. Fostering that kind of passion and happiness is so important to me right now. It's the kind of energy I can share with other people. Starting with you. Happy writing everyone! And remember—write what you love!

S.