This time last year I was just starting to understand the importance of ebooks. It wasn’t until late summer that I really understood how much ebooks were taking over the marketplace and that they were here to stay. Mostly because of my own personal preference. I love the look and feel and smell of books. I enjoy browsing at the bookstore looking at covers and the organized stacks of books all around me. When I finally changed my own mindset and realized that a book was still a book, even if it wasn’t in paper format, a whole new world opened up to me. I now get excited to spend the $20 I would have spent on 1 maybe 2 books at the bookstore on 10-15 ebooks, depending on the price. It has allowed me to take a chance on unknown authors and read genres I may not have wanted to try because of the cost. It’s opened up a whole new world as a reader and definitely as an author. For me as an author it’s made the dream of being published a reality.

What have ebooks done for you?

I have shiny ball syndrome. Something I have mentioned before on this blog. It’s very easy for me to get distracted by getting excited about something new and then am tempted to walk away from my work in progress. I have learned that a good way for me to combat that is to purposely have a couple different projects in the pipeline so that I can jump back and forth when it suits me. It keeps me from getting bored with one project and either walking away altogether or struggling to keep on task. I have also found that when I hit a block with one being able to switch to another helps me keep from going days without writing.

The drawback is I do get confused at times on which project I’m working on and where I’m and where I’m going.

How do you organize your projects and do you work on multiple ones at a time?

Laina

I say this because I just finished a novella prequel that ended much differently than I had planned. My new book, A Day in the Life of Trixie Pristine, launches a new series about Trixie Pristine and her friends and my intent when starting out was to have more of a Rom-Com series since I have my Presley Thurman series, which has more of the murder and mayhem aspect. However, as I started writing I ended up killing someone. It just happened and I didn’t realize until I had done it that the novella was going in that direction. Is something wrong with me? Do I have some underlying anger that makes me want to kill people on paper? I know a lot of authors who write different genres and while what I had intended to write wasn’t that far apart in genre it ended up being the same. Which again isn’t necessarily a bad thing but I was hoping to have a little more of a differentiator.

I am interested in knowing if you have found yourself in the same situation where you start out writing with one intent in mind and end up with another?

Laina

Like most of us I am always working to improve my craft. Over the weekend I came across a good article on some steps to take to become a better writer (get original article here). One of the steps it talked about was once you finished the rough draft to go back through and pretend you had to cut a third of it. This would force you to be concise and not wander off. For me I thought this was great advice and I used it this weekend while editing my next book.

Hope you find this article useful.

Laina