Blog 400 part ii

Last week, when I was approaching my 400th blog, I invited my followers on Twitter to contribute ideas for what they’d like to read in it. Some of them were pretty good, so Blog 400 will now appear as a blog in several parts over the next week. You see... I do try to give you a little bang for your buck.

@TheMeksWorkshop thought I should revisit my very first blog and talk about what’s changed and how I found my way to blog post 400. So, here goes.

First of all, if you’re interested, here’s where you can read Blog 1. 

Funny thing blog 1.

Having just read it again, probably for the first time since I wrote it on February 4th 2012, I wonder who I was writing it for. It doesn’t sound like me, and while the content is, more or less true, it’s a selective kind of truth that baffles me now.

Honestly, I wouldn’t write a blog like it 400 blogs later... I don’t write blogs remotely like it now.

It seems guarded to me. It reads like a publicity piece for a magazine.

As far as blogging goes, I think 400 blogs have taught me quite a lot about blogging and how I want to do it. I couldn’t have kept up that slightly artificial, slightly arms-length tone for very long, and, let’s face it, I didn’t keep it up.

As far as the content is concerned. Well, I think we all know what happened, don’t we? My novel, Naming Names was a runner-up for the prize. The winner and the other runner-up have both done very nicely, thank you. Brava! 

Naming Names is yet to be published.

What Naming Names might look like

It has been a bit of a rollercoaster... A rollercoaster that includes two agents and, currently, six novels. I have published some short stories and collaborations with the husband, and other things, which have not had my name on the covers.

Of everything I have ever written, Naming Names has had the most work. It is currently undergoing more rewrites. I think, right now, I’m on the third... no fourth draft. It will be a very different book from the one that did so well in the Mslexia, but it will also be a much more accessible book, and, I hope, finally, something that might be published. I still have great faith in it, and, if I can do it justice, it is still the book that I most want to see on the shelves of the big bookstores. 

In the meantime, I have just signed commissioning forms on two more collaborations with the husband, and I am sitting on ideas for at least four more of my own novels, including a follow-up, of sorts, to Naming Names, which has a working title of The Winter Lamb. 

I would say more about this book, and the others, ideas for which are constantly spinning in my head, but then what would I talk about in my next 400 blogs?

By the way, if you're a woman writer who hasn't yet published a novel, Mslexia is holding its latest novel writing competition right now. Check it out here.