The Long Haul - IWSG April 2024

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of our fearless ninja leader Alex Cavanaugh. Thank you to the April co-hosts:  Janet Alcorn, T. Powell Coltrin, Natalie Aguirre, and Pat Garcia! To read other contributors, click here.

April question - How long have you been blogging? (Or on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?) What do you like about it and how has it changed?

Fifteen years ago, the day after a surprise layoff, I sat at the computer fashioning an essay about how it felt to be suddenly unemployed. I had no plan to create Middle Passages but on a whim, I looked up how to start a blog. Google made it so easy, before the day was over that essay became my first live post. Publishing it was life-changing because in it I revealed my closeted writing passion and announced my intention to make sure no matter what I did next, writing would be a part of it. Talk about making myself accountable.

For the first several months I published in a vacuum, unaware I needed to follow and earn followers, otherwise my words disappeared into a vast black hole. My first (non-family) comment appeared the same day I joined a LinkedIn writing group. After that we were off to the races. I joined a world in which bloggers hosted writing contests and blog hops and bestowed blog awards. I wrote five days a week and the whole process was so encouraging that quite frankly, I loved it. This blog eased me through much soul searching and self-discovery. It gave me purpose. It made me dare to try new things.

That said, even early in my blogging “career,” writers I admired stopped posting and/or moved on to other communication vehicles. Many had blogged to enhance their author brands and found quicker/different ways to market themselves. My life morphed too. I worked part-time and freelanced for a period before accepting full-time employment again, and yes, I write as a part of my job. I also write my own fiction and with less time to myself, eventually something had to give. I’m still here, but now I blog once a month for IWSG. 

So many bloggers from those beginning days have moved on. There are many I still miss. Sadly, a few  have passed away. Some have stopped writing. Others write but don’t blog. Who's to say how life will morph for any of us? But for me, regardless of all that has changed, there's one thing that never will. I'll remain ever grateful that on my first unexpected, unemployed day, I wrote a heartfelt essay and dared myself to press "publish."

What do you like best about blogging?

Writing in Kind - IWSG March 2024

 

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of  our fearless ninja leader Alex Cavanaugh. The Cohost for the March posting of IWSG are: Kristina Kelly, Miffie Seideman, Jean Davis, and ME! To read other contributors, click here.

This month’s question: Have you "played" with AI to write those nasty synopses, or do you refuse to go that route? How do you feel about AI's impact on creative writing?

Since I wrote recently about AI in October and things haven’t changed much (though I did write a synopsis without AI), I’m going to pass on this month’s question. Instead I’d like to talk about something else. Perhaps because I'm co-hosting this month's IWSG for the first time...ever, but this week, I read an old Middle Passages IWSG post from so long ago I didn’t remember writing it. I was testing out my fiction writing chops and had used a scene storming technique to create a piece of flash fiction. Many years later, my take is while the story was good, the writing was not. There were so many things I hadn’t learned yet, I winced a fair bit while reading. Even so, every person who commented on the piece offered positive feedback or a constructive suggestion designed to teach. I guess that's a no brainer considering we're all members of the same “support group," but it bears noting that this type of regular encouragement spurred me to grow as a writer. Here at IWSG, no one bashed my inexperience. Dare I say everyone was nice?

Having grown up in the dark ages of print media, I’m still flabbergasted when I’m on a site where I encounter negative online comments. Back in the day, you couldn’t post a letter to the editor without leaving a name and address, which as a general rule, promoted self-editing. Nowadays, it feels to me as if anonymity breeds negativity. That’s why I am so impressed with IWSG. Over the many years I’ve posted here, I’ve only encountered reassurance and support.

In my early writing days, I followed a [now dark] blog called The Kindness Project. While the name may be different, IWSG is a kindness project of sorts. I suppose blogging is pretty passe now. The bulk of the universe has moved on to newer, faster, quicker things. But I'm so proud of this core of us who remain, encouraging, caring, and supporting. I’m pleased and grateful to find myself in such good company when I show up here every month.

 

Hearing the Difference - IWSG February 2024

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. Thank you to this month’s co-hosts  Janet Alcorn, SE White, Victoria Marie Lees, and Cathrina Constantine.

Since I can’t say I’ve ever felt critical about an author’s webpage, I’m passing on this month’s question in favor of an update.

I wrote last month about the “Read Aloud” feature in word, and how it's helping me. It’s been such a success that after two passes through my most current project, I dared to ask a friend to beta read it. Before she left for a week sailing the Caribbean (insert envious sigh here), she’d plowed through most of it, calling me frequently to offer feedback. Other than multiple examples of missing end quotes and a couple of typos I didn't catch, her feedback has been positive and encouraging. Upon her return I’ll get her final analysis on the story.

As I suggested I would in last month's post, I’m now using “read aloud” to take a hard look at one of my earlier non-published books, which I haven’t edited with any seriousness since 2018. I love the story. Love it. But I crashed and burned querying and came to believe the book wasn’t ready, yet.

Conventional wisdom says leaving a project to rest for a while is a good thing. Perhaps leaving it to rest for a LONG while is better. I’m on my second “read aloud” edit and still believe in the novel. By listening to Word read to me, I’ve found places where I can tweak things to make them clearer, and where I've needed to cut to make the writing more concise. I always thought I was a better reader than listener. “Read aloud” has proved me wrong. But, the good news is that while I've found plenty that can use fixing, I’ve had more times in which I’ve found myself tickled, in a Holy Moly, I wrote this? kind of way. 

An author I love once said she didn't give up with her book because she refused to let something on which she worked so hard disappear into a drawer. I’ve got four somethings like that, two of which have yet to go through “read aloud” rigor.

Here’s hoping I’m not setting myself up for more crash and burn, but January was an optimistic month for me.

What has been your experience with the "read aloud" feature in word? What other editing tricks do you use?

The Voice of (New) Experience - IWSG January 2024

Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG is the brainchild of Alex Cavanaugh. Thank you to this month’s co-hosts, Joylene Nowell Butler, Olga Godim, Diedre Knight, and Natalie Aguirre. To read posts from other contributors, click here.

Happy New Year all!

Since I’ve had no experience with BookBub, I’m going to ignore this month’s question. Instead, I'll tell you about how my year ended with a good start.

Seems like I’ve been writing forever, never getting to where I want to be, but still plugging. A lot of it is my own fault in that I don’t push myself hard enough. But that aside, I’m aware I have a weakness with accuracy. No matter how I struggle to proofread—reading aloud, letting a manuscript rest, printing the piece out and using my red pen to mark it up, changing the font so things look different, I miss mistakes that make my work look amateurish. I overlook where “then” should be “than,” where “you are,” should become “you’re,” and where I say the same things three different ways when one would do. When proofing, my mind goes too fast. I know what I wanted to write and my brain assumes I wrote it. Even worse, I make typos while correcting the mistakes I discover.

I don’t know what took me so long. I’ve been aware of the “Read Aloud” feature in Word for years, but midway through December and half-way through an edit of my current manuscript, something made me start using it.

Holy Moly, what a difference a boring voice makes. With monotone computer woman droning at me, I catch mistakes because with her lack of inflection, she forces me to hear them. Whether it’s leaving out a comma (She doesn’t pause, so I stop and look.), catching where I’d changed a tense but left in “ing” instead of “ed,” hearing where a sentence is just plumb awkward, the list goes on and on. I go back and forth between being horrified at just how many mistakes there are, and grateful that finally, finally, I seem to have discovered the means with which to fix (most of) them.

It’s been a hallelujah, praise the Lord kind of few weeks for me—an early Christmas gift of confidence to think that maybe in this way, I can continue to improve my work. 

Once I get through my current manuscript, I’ll decide where it goes from there. While that’s happening, I have three other novels gathering dust in a proverbial drawer. I’m going to let computer voice have her way with them, too.

Do you use the "Read Aloud" feature in Word? What are your best tips for accurate proofreading?