Emily Grayson
Image from Pixabay
Reader, Writer, Poet, Artist
Emily Grayson
Beka hails from the Great White North (aka Canada), where she reads, dreams, and doodles away. She loves bringing characters from the written page to the visual eye, and dabbles in pencil and coloured pencil and the occasional watercolor. Her dream is to one day get into digital art and save some trees.
Once upon a time, not too long ago, in fact, a little less than a year ago…
{August 19th, 2017}
“Hey, Annie, remember how you were asking, ‘what will I write next’ the other day?”
I did ask that question, after finishing Jump: The Things I Remind Myself. But when God asks a question like that, I’ve found He tends to have ulterior motives behind it. So I very cautiously said, “yeah, I remember… what about it?”
“Well, I’ve got one for you. Write a book for your mom.”
Cue wide eyes and a heck of a lot of confusion. And a scrambled message to my girl’s group. “I think I’m supposed to write a book for my mom. Help!”
Go figure, they all thought it was a brilliant idea.
“Hey Annie,” came the somewhat amused voice from the upstairs regions of the cosmos. “It’s for her birthday next year, by the way. And it’s about books. The interior will be cream paper, with an artistic book drawing for underneath the chapter headers. The cover will be purple.”
And that is the story of why I had a meltdown from August 19th to August 21st.
This was uncharted territory for me. I was pretty sure it would be a novel, not one of my short stories or a novella or something easy. (I’ve never completed a first draft of a novel, only a lot of partial first drafts.) And I had less than a year. And I needed to keep it a secret from everyone around me. (I’m horrible at keeping exciting things secret.)
{the journey}
The rest of August, September, and October were spent in a weird sort of stasis. I didn’t write a whole lot, at least, not that I remember. I did a lot of thinking. I spent a lot of time with books, and with my mom. And by mid October I had a pretty solid idea of what this story was supposed to look like.
November came around and I used NaNoWriMo as my excuse to pound out a 50k novel in a very short period of time. For the first time, I had a whole, finished, novel. And I couldn’t tell anyone.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from this story:
“That’s the thing, Miranda, you never get over the butterflies if it’s the right person. They just settle down a bit. If it’s the right person, you just go your whole life being all tangled up with the butterflies in your stomach and the love in your heart.”Through the Pages
Annie Louise Twitchell
Fun Fact: I had the hardest time finding an editor until I was actually ready to see about hiring one. At that point, Facebook hiccuped and showed me a notification for a post from an editing page I’d been following and hadn’t done much looking into. If you’re in the US, I highly recommend Lemons to Lemonade Editing. Not only did she do a wonderful job with my line edits, but she works on paper, meaning I had a marked up paper copy to make my changes from. That was perfect for how my head works and the way I prefer to do things, and made my process of fixing things so much easier.
Fun Fact #2: I’m still a bit giddy that I actually did this thing. I will probably be varying degrees of giddy for the next two months.
Fun Fact #3: I’ve actually been so overwhelmed since I gave the book to my mom on the 5th that I’ve had two or three headaches and gone swimming a lot and written almost nothing. Just this blog post. I’ll get back in my groove eventually. I think.
~Annie
Well, kind of.
I’ve had an interesting relationship with summer vacation for a ridiculously long time, but one thing has been true for the last several years: I never stick to my blogging schedule during the summer.
I mean, it’s not like I stick to my schedule anyway; my schedule says I post once a week on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday (but not usually Wednesday) and I still don’t manage to be super consistent with that. I’ve learned to loosen up a lot and just let it be what it is, and if I don’t post this week, so be it! I’m okay with that.
Anyway, as I sit here in my chair at 9pm trying to decide what to do this evening, I decided to go look at my blog set up, and hey look! I have no scheduled posts, no drafts, and no ideas.
And I’m okay with that.
As of right now, I’m offically giving myself the summer off. If I have something that really merits a blog post, I’ll make one up and schedule it for one of the days in my terribly ambiguous schedule. If not, I’m not going to worry about it.
In other words, see you in August!
But I’ll be on my social media accounts on my usual semi-daily basis and sending my newsletter every month, so I won’t be vanishing entirely. It’s just that I spend so much time outside during the summer and I’m trying to get out of the habit of 6am to 11pm work days, so I think removing this stresser for the summer months will be a huge benefit for my overall sanity. (People tell me it’s questionable at best.)
I plan to spend the summer reading, swimming, gardening, not dying while my family does a plethora of projects, star gazing and mosquito swatting, avoiding moose flies (ask me sometime about being used a moose fly bait when I was nine), writing, and hanging out with a popsicle. I had planned to hike a mountain in July until the weather got to a roasting 72 degrees Fahrenheit last week and I remembered why I like hiking in September: less bugs and less heat. So the hiking trip might be postponed. We’ll see.
See you in August if not before!
-Annie
As you may know, I read a lot of books. My Goodreads count so far for 2018 is thirty-two, which is lower than I’d expected, but it’s because I haven’t really read much in the last couple weeks even though I have three or four books I’m currently reading through.
In the last couple of days, I’ve identified the “reading block” I’ve been experiencing. It helped once I realized this is something that happens every year. You see, I read a lot of fantasy stories during the year. And every year for the last… six years or so, when the weather here turns hot, I stop being able to read fantasy.
Now, why this happens, I have no idea. But it happens. And to some extent it affects my ability to write fantasy.
So today I have a favor to ask:
Recommend your favorite contemporary, romance, chick lit, mystery, etc, and I’ll check it out. I might not read it–depending on how many I get and which ones I’m interested in–but I need some more contemporary lit!
Bonus points if it’s an Indie author. Because the Indie book club I’m in focuses on Indie Fantasy, I haven’t met many contemporary Indies.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need some lemonade to make up for forcing my head to read fantasy when it’s too hot to handle it.
~Annie
Inspired by Nancy Chase
nancychase.com
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See this pretty cover? Hehe |
Blog: http://www.rebekahdevall.
{Author Interview}
{My review}
5 stars
She did it again. Rebekah DeVall did it again. Iron Core has more of the gripping emotion I’ve come to love in her writing, wrapped in a fresh story and bright new characters. Iron Core is intense, for all the brevity of the story. She seems to make one sentence do the work of two. Lunetta is a dear who needs to be loved and taken care of, but she doesn’t seem to allow for that. Persa… Carlotta… ZANE, who I definitely don’t have a tiny crush on. I love the characters. They’re tangible and I can feel the threads of their own histories that make them into the individuals they are, even in such a short little book.
Recommend for teens 14+
All my love – AnnieLou