I have been remiss in getting up the vacation posts, but I’ve started writing one and will get around to it, I promise. Mostly I’ve been writing and writing and… well writing. And that doesn’t count the time I’ve wasted on Twitter, which I’ve suddenly found infinitely more useful.
For those of you who want to try twittering more but aren’t sure how it will help, start learning about hashtags. Once I saw a few friends from the reddit forum for fantasy writers using the hashtags #amwriting and #amwritingfantasy, I began using them as well. Almost every morning I’ll tweet out a line or two from the current work and include those hashtags. Suddenly I went from a handful of followers to around 30. Whether or not they’ll read the finished effort, it’s good to know folks are interested in what I have to say. Not everyone stays a follower for long, but still… it’s worth it to try that out if you’re struggling with how to increase your social networking lists as you develop your works.
I also took part in #PitMad on twitter this week, where you tweet out a one line pitch for your novel with the hashtags #PitMad and the genre (for example, #A for adult, #F for fantasy, #YA for young adult, etc). You are allowed three tweets during the day, and agents will scan the feed and “like” tweeted proposals they want to see more of. I got likes from three small publishers and one real agent, which was a great result I felt. I’ve already submitted the formal query to the agent and will consider the publishers, though I’m concerned with the size of these small firms. One was fairly new (but I liked the vibe they were putting out), the other two established but without any titles I could say were really great. Still, I’ll keep them in mind for another week or two and make a decision on those. So yeah… check out #PitMad in a few months when it comes back around again. Any tool that gets your work in front of more eyes is a valuable one.
Closing out August (finally), it was a very low month in terms of tallies. 10,347 words written for a paltry 338 words per day average. However, I’m still happy with that amount since I spent half the month on the road during my vacation and did little writing (plus I’m so far ahead of my 350,000 words of new fiction in 2016 goal I could afford to slack off). I also took some more time when I got back to decide what I wanted to focus on this fall. I shopped around the beginning to the urban fantasy novel, Summer, to some beta readers and got great comments on it. So that’s become the focus, and after a conversion with my lovely muse (my darling wife) I have some great ideas to work with as I move forward through the always sticky middle section of the novel.
Other than that, school has started again. Two classes this semester, but so far going well. But they expect their essays to have more than 140 characters, so I can’t rely on Twitter to help me pass.