I have a dream. And a goal. Lots of writing goals. But I need your help to get there.

I’ve been writing for a long time. I have published a handful of novels that honestly haven’t been widely read. It’s really hard to get people to read your books if you don’t have a big name or someone like Oprah or Reese or Jenna promoting your work. Sometimes, I can’t even give them away. Needless to say, I am not earning a living from my writing.

Before you start to feel too sorry for me, I must admit that I am no starving artist. At least not since I started working two full-time jobs (don’t worry, they’re cake jobs: it’s not as bad as it sounds). We are a dual income family, so we’re not exactly hard up for money. Unfortunately, both incomes must be earned by one person, me. I officially got my single-parent family out from under the poverty line about two years ago, and things have steadily improved for us since. Where I’m going with this is that money is no longer the issue, per se. But the time I am spending making money instead of writing is getting to be an issue.

Hi, my name is Mandy Webster, and I survived domestic violence.

My sister survived domestic violence too, as have several of my aunts and cousins, whether they care to admit it or not. I have a vivid memory of visiting an aunt when I was child, of one of my cousins showing me a hole in the wall and telling me, “My dad did that.” I am currently watching a niece grapple with a coercive control situation that will likely become violent, if it hasn’t already. If we don’t find a way to help her escape, she might end up like our cousin who didn’t survive domestic violence. In 2019, that cousin’s ex-husband murdered her in cold blood, shooting her in the back and head multiple times while their five-year-old played in the next room.

Yes, I am quite familiar with domestic violence. But I don’t let my experiences with domestic violence define me. Instead, I have worked hard to define it. I’ve talked to lots of survivors, read books on the subject, and even took a criminal justice studies course on intimate partner violence to try to understand how this could have happened to me. I watched The Perfect Victim and consumed Maid (both the book and the Netflix series), and read countless memoirs written by my fellow survivors. I want to understand and expose family violence in the hopes that I can help someone else save themselves the same way I saved me.

I saved me.

I’ve often considered writing a memoir about my experiences and might still do so. The problem is, like many PTSD suffers, I struggle to pin down the memories of what happened through those ten years of trauma. Sometimes it feels like my body remembers more than my brain does. The memories often come in disjointed flashes when I care to think about them the least.

National Poetry Month Collaborative Twitter Poem

Poetry (Photo credit: V. H. Hammer)

Well, here we are. It’s April 1^st, and once again time to celebrate National Poetry Month. I haven’t really been writing much poetry lately, so I thought it might be fun to do a collaborative Twitter poem challenge.

For this challenge, I am going to give you a one-word prompt/Twitter handle. Next, you come up with a poem – either one short poem that will fit into one 140-character Tweet, or a longer poem that you can split up, posting one verse per Tweet – and share it on Twitter using the provided hashtag. I am starting the challenge here today, and then I would love it if some of you would volunteer to host one or a few additional prompts on your blogs throughout the month of April.

Describe something in ten different ways

Sometimes, I think my descriptive writing looks a little like this. | Child Art Aged 2.5 Smiley Face with Writing Underneath (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Chuck Wendig/TerribleMinds writing exercise for today is to describe one thing in ten different ways. I decided I needed to attempt this one since description is NOT my strong suit. I chose to describe description:

Writing description, for me, 1) is like pulling teeth. Yes, cliché is often my go-to strategy. Don’t most of our brains take the path of least resistance most of the time? It’s 2) like a traffic jam when I’m already late (HA!)

Okay, now that I’m done dating myself, let’s proceed, shall we?

Writing description 3) is hard for me. Once in a great while, 4) it pours out of me as though someone has turned on the rusty description faucet in my head, full-blast, if only for a few minutes.

You gotta be you, I gotta be me

Getting to your best writing requires very little conscious thought. | Thinking (Photo credit: Moyan_Brenn)

Picture it: Sicily, 1965. Wait. No. That’s the Golden Girls. Remember them? But I digress.

Picture it: You wake before your alarm and lie in bed waiting for your alarm to catch up. You get an idea. A brilliant idea. You should get up and start writing immediately, but your bed is so warm and snug. So, you don’t. Instead, you lay there for an hour, waiting for your alarm to make you get up, turning the idea in your head. It’ll be okay. You can write it down after you get up. It will still be brilliant then.

Only, it’s not. Somehow, the words that slipped through the sieve of your morning mind refuse to maintain their original early morning brilliance. On the page, they are wooden and just not quite right. What happened? Where did you go wrong? Was the idea just not as brilliant as you thought it was?

Tell me about your new book

Some days, an outside job filling pot holes sounds more appealing than an inside job filling plot holes. | Le Festival des Pot Holes…. (Photo credit: caribb)

I don’t know about you, but I sure haven’t been blogging much since the start of the new year. What I have been doing is plugging away at two novels in progress, both of which seem to grow farther from completion with each new plot hole I fill. It’s funny how that works, isn’t it?

You know, sometimes revising a novel is kinda like when you think you’re just going to quickly replace a bathtub in your 100-year-old house only to realize that by removing the old bathtub, you have now exposed a whole host of other problems you didn’t know existed, including rotten floor boards and termite ravished support beams. Yeah, revision can be a lot like remodeling a bathroom in a house that maybe should have been condemned a long time ago…

Needless to say, blogging hasn’t been as much on my mind lately as it once was.

Did you write a novel this season?

This is a current draft of the cover for my NaNoWriMo project.

Earlier this year, I started my Write Your Novel this Summer Challenge, which then morphed into Write Your Novel this Season. While I did manage to complete a full draft over the summer, I am still working on my fall novel. Considering I am only three chapters in, I am kind of doubting I will finish it by the first day of Winter (December 21^st.) However, I have managed to get into a regular writing routine, so there are no worries here. Looking back, I see that I have made great progress over this past year.

I spent the early part of 2013 writing a 90+ page creative thesis that would net me an A for the final semester of my Master’s level professional writing program. I graduated in May, found and lost a job (that, looking back, I am happy didn’t work out). I was unemployed for the summer but spent a lot of that season traveling and spending time with family members I hardly ever get to see.

As I mentioned above, I wrote a full first draft novel that I am currently revising. I also wrote a full memoir/writing manifesto-type manuscript for NaNoWriMo, just to prove to myself that I could write 50,000 words in one month. I am even considering publishing it and offering it up for free downloads.

And now, 600 Words (Only 400 more to go!)

What does human evolution have to do with it? You decide! Write the next 200 words of this story and post it to your blog. | Journal of Human Evolution (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s time for Part 3 of Chuck Wendig’s 200 Words Flash Fiction Challenge. The explanations are getting a bit unwieldy at this point, so I’m just going to jump right into my latest story:

First 200+ Words (from David Kearney)

The lecture theatre door slammed shut with a bang so loud half the room jumped in their seat. Alice descended the stairs, not oblivious to the 200 pairs of indignant eyes boring through her, and took the only available seat at the front of the class.

Professor Gordon Kane stood at the lectern and looked over the top his glasses at her. “Welcome Miss Turner, what a remarkable entrance. I was just about to introduce my colleague to your classmates, may I continue?”

Alice’s face burned so hard she thought her hair might catch fire.

Kane gestured toward a tall man wearing a green turtleneck and a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. “I expect that many of you will recognize our guest,” he said.

She recognized him immediately; in fact, he was the very reason she was late for class.

How long does it take to become a writing master?

How many words do you think you need to write to become a writing master? | Painting The Writing Master by Thomas Eakins (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Facebook friend recently shared a link to an article titled, Here’s A Shocking Truth If You Think You’ve Wasted Your Life. According to this article, it takes a person about seven years to master a particular task. This prompted me to consider how long I have been writing and how close I should expect myself to be to mastering it.

After giving it some thought, it occurred to me that I am probably exactly where I should be in regards to my writing career. Although I have been writing in some capacity for most of my life, it is only in the past five years that I have put my full effort into it. Prior to that, I had taken a ten-year break while I was married because my ex didn’t want me to write at all.

200 Words: Part 2 of Making Merry

My son’s kitten has been making her own bit of merriment in my tree. Stop, ornament thief!

The past two weeks, I have been participating in Chuck Wendig’s 200 Words flash fiction challenge. This week, author Michael Woods picked up my story start, Making Merry, and added the next 200 words. You may read it over on his blog.

So far, my favorite part about this activity is seeing how another author can completely change the setting you had in your head just by adding a couple of words. For example, I had originally pictured a lower-middle class suburban neighborhood with small ranch houses, but the addition of the Saab and BMW parked on the street suddenly morphed the setting I had in mind to more of an upper-middle class neighborhood. This totally changes the dynamic of the story moving forward.