A Far Out Fantastic Site

 It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG)  post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. IWSG Question of the Month The IWSG question for this month is: "For how long do you shelve your first draft before reading it and re-drafting? Is this dependent on your writing experience and the number of stories/books under your belt?"  I don't have a precise amount of time that I shelve, or in my case file, the first draft to a story that I write. However, when I file a draft in a folder that I keep first drafts of fiction in, the time that it sits in there often averages from four to six months. I've set up my own rule to let a first draft sit in my filing cabinet for at least two weeks if it's a short story. If it's a longer work, which I seldom write, I'll let it sit for longer, at least about two mo...

Welcome to another post of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) , a network of bloggers who post every first Wednesday of the month about problems in writing and how to solve them. It was founded by blogger/author Alex Cavanaugh. This month it is co-hosted by Lee Lowery, Juneta Key, Yvonne Ventresca, and T. Powell Coltrin. This month’s IWSG writing problem that I’ll discuss here at the Far Out Fantastic Site is how to stay motivated with revising your story. Even though I’ll read them, I was never a big fan of writing long works of fiction. I am more of a short story writer. However, my current novella, titled Invasion of the Avatars , that I’m working on is the long work that I’ve stayed with the longest so far. Because I’m ADD, it’s hard for me to stay focused on writing long fiction such as novels. Yet, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing a novel, so one NaNoWriMo, the nationwide novel writing challenge that occurs each November, I compromised with m...

Of course authors have to read their own work in order to revise it. But do they read their own work after it’s been published? To put it another way, do they become one of the ir reader s ? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. However, I’m one that doesn’t. I may have only read one of my published stories once and that was probably the first fiction work I published. It’s entitled “Strange Phenomena” which now appears in my short fiction collection, The Fool’s Illusion . Before that, I published it in an anthology of myth themed stories and poems, called Leafkin , Volume 2, which is unfortunately out of print. If I read it in that anthology, if I’m remembering correctly, that’s because I wanted to see how it read in its published format. Since then, I haven’t had time to read my own work post-publication. In my experience, by the time your story gets published you know it too well to where you don’t want to read it anymore. After the numerous revisions you’ve gone through on ...