Writing A Blessing

  When I started turning to the internet for writing and publishing advice, it seemed like everyone and their mothers was prepping me for the first rejection. That it would soul crushing, world ending, and it would make me want to quit.  Then I got my first rejection and it really wasn't that bad. I was actually excited! It added some good feedback on how to improve my prologue, an issue I, nor my beta readers, noticed! So it was a really amazing first rejection, that actually fueled me even more to keep querying because I know my book has that potential!   Well, now I'm almost 10 rejections deep and phew. Each rejection has a different reaction. Some I'm like 'oh man. Oh well.' and move on, others sting more than some. Like one agent, I thought my book was perfect for! She rejected my query and, man, that stung for a few days because I felt really sure.  But, everyday is a new day; full of potential requests and offers! One step at a time, there's no need to ru...

  So, you are standing in a bookshop. You found a pretty looking book, with a beautiful cover, in your favorite genre, and blurb on the back tells you that you would love this book. Excited, you open the book to the first pages, you see a title page, a map, and another title page, then you see a list of trigger warnings. You roll your eyes, annoyed, and go to put the book back. "Why is this even here?" you ask yourself, "Who needs a trigger warning on (Genre Here)?"      Well, Love, pick that book back up and let's take a closer look, shall we?     Trigger warning lists may not mean much to you, but they could me the world to someone else. Even in genres like Horror, Extreme Horror, or Romance, trigger warnings can mean the difference between thrilled in the best ways, or chilled in the worst.      If you're reading horror, you expect to be scared, and left haunted by the words on the page. But what would happen if you were reading a horror, ...

      You hear all the time about planners and pantsers. Writers who plan so meticulously, and writers who just open their doc and start typing. Even o ne of thee greatest horror authors of all time, Steven King, is a pantser. I believe he once said (but don't quote me) that no having a plan, is still a plan.      I've always been somewhere in the middle, I plan and plan, but there's only so much planning I can do believe I have to sit down and write. I can plan as I go sometimes, but there's nothing more magical than getting to my later chapters...Thinking about something and going back an earlier chapter and realize I had unintentionally written some amazing foreshadowing.      Like, here's a bit of a spoiler for my querying novel, Darling of the Fire!     In the early chapters I wrote a bit that was actually in reference to my favorite comedy DnD podcast, the Adventure Zone, by the McElroy family. There are several beautiful less...