Happy New Year!

If you’re local, hope you can join me and Christian women’s fiction author Elaine Stock at the Sand Lake Town Library this Saturday, Jan. 7, 1-2:30 pm.

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Elaine and I are both members of the Women’s Fiction Writer’s Association. This is a young and welcoming group that embraces both published and aspiring authors, traditionally published or self-published. You get access to courses, contests, feedback, and discussion, including opportunities to network with agents and published authors. I think it’s a great organization to belong to if your fiction falls into that genre at all.

Also, you might enjoy a blog post I recently wrote for Women Writers, Women’s Books, called “Why Won’t (Insert Name Here) Read My Book?” It’s about the inevitable painful realization all published writers have that not everybody they know and love wants to read their books. (I know, shocking, right?)

This coming year I plan to interview a number of other authors, and will also poke my head in occasionally with new stuff on my own front, but mostly I’m challenging myself to write the next novel a whole lot faster than I have in the past.

I need to, since after this winter it will be time to go back to full-time work. As I contemplate a future without Obamacare, I don’t see any responsible way around it — and that’s okay, since there are plenty of other things I like to do besides writing — and, frankly, every single one of them pays better.

Hope this finds you well. I wish you a wonderful year of reading and (if it’s your thing) writing! Onward!

16 thoughts on “Happy New Year!

  1. Guess what? I can do this! I wasn’t sure at first, because my daughter and I have had plans for months to attend the Twelfth Night festivities at the Schuyler Mansion on the same day. But Mapquest assures me I can get from Stillwater to Sand Lake in under an hour, and then to the mansion from there in less than half an hour, so….

    Weather permitting, I will be there, ready to learn!

    • Ooh, that’s exciting! I look forward to meeting you in person! (I was looking at the Twelfth Night stuff myself, until I realized the date.) If you want to be extra-sure to get in, call and reserve a spot at 674-5050.

      • I called – thanks for the heads-up! I’ll be sure to introduce myself. Lise may opt out of coming with me, but I will be there as long as the weather isn’t terrifying.

        I had never been to the Mansion until last October, when Lise and I went. It’s so beautiful, and I’m so eager to see it come to life in candlelight and evergreens…

        Now I might need to set several projects aside and actually finish your book, which I was hesitating to pick up because I don’t think I’ll be able to put it down once I do!

  2. Her name sounds familiar. I think she may have interviewed my lifelong best friend on her blog a couple of years ago…maybe I’ll look that up.

    BTW, I’m loving yours. Dori and I could be spirit sisters in so many ways!

  3. I just finished. I’ll need a sleep or two to absorb it all, but, suffice it to say that you have blown me away. Review is coming, once I’ve had a little time to wrap my mind around it…

    Also, I’ve recently encountered a comparison between blackface and the cast of Hamilton portraying white people when they are in fact people of color. (On Twitter, no less). I know why it’s not the same, because I know something of the research and respect that went into the making of the musical, and I want to blog about it, because Tweets don’t offer room to address such a subject cogently or at any depth. It’s simmering in my mind, but I haven’t seen a lot of blackface, and I tend to be very empathetic. I’ve been afraid to look, even though that doesn’t change anything.

    But, if you’d be willing to share any of your sources, so I could dip my perception into it a bit more slowly, I would be deeply gratified.

    Last little thing. I noticed a few minor typos. Would it be helpful to you if I was to track them down and send you a list? It drives me nuts when I go over something again and again multiplied by a few, and those little vermin slip past my best due diligence.

    • Hell, yeah. I thought my lovely eagle-eyed proofreaders had caught them all.

      There is no video of actual blackface from the era when it was popular, just recreations of it, because it predated moving pictures (though in Vermont of all places it continued right into the 20’s!). If you search YouTube for it, you’ll see movies about minstrelsy. You might want to do a search of blackface on this blog, because I’m pretty sure I did at least one post about it. If not, I guess I should. It might be in the one about Ellaville. I hadn’t realized “Way Down Upon the Suwanee River” — the Florida state song, — was originally a minstrel song.

  4. Happy New Year, Sandra! Thanks for all your posts of 2016. I hope your employment, whatever it is, brings fresh vigor to your writing. I remember a year in which I decided to work full time in a group home for dually-diagnosed women, and how (somehow) this experience released me to make more exciting paintings than I had been able to make before. Perhaps it had something to do with realizing I wasn’t much saner than those with whom I worked.

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