Thursday, October 7, 2010

Open Topic Thursday: You Say Hello, I Say Good Bye

Excited about this weekend. YA author Kelly Creagh will be at the Barnes and Noble at the Summit on Saturday and J.R. Ward will be at The Bookstore in Radcliff. 

Also, fellow Lyrical Press author Nicole Dennis' Dragon's Sanity cover is up for Clash of the Covers at Embrace the Shadows. Please show her some love and give her a vote. (I won last month.) :-)

Let's see. Progress on my three short novels... I've added 2069 new words to the Zaphkiel story and plotted the second half of the book. So far, I've written 3064 words for Cathedral Girl. The first chapters of Serpent Fire are currently under revision. I keep waffling between the idea of having the main character be a reporter or a NTSB agent. 

I'm also working on short story ideas to submit to magazines and anthologies. Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck in a quagmire, but I keep telling myself to push forward.

On to today's topic. I'm leaving one of my writing groups. While members were supportive when I first joined, lately this doesn't seem so. I hope I'm wrong, but I've sensed disapproval over what I write. For those of you who don't know, many of my stories have M/M relationships. Anyway, there's been a gradual change, for lack of a better word, in some members' attitudes and I've decided maybe it's best to move on.

There are other reasons why I'm reluctant to stay, but I won't go into details. While I hope this is a temporary situation, I also have to consider what's best for my writing career. It's not as if there aren't other, more supportive groups. There are. And it's not even an issue of people being supportive or approving. I'm not so naive as to think everyone should love my stories. But I see no point in being part of a group that could negatively impact me. 

I'm not upset about the situation. Like I said, I may return. In the meantime, I'm going to focus my efforts on writing and submitting. Ultimately, it's not any writing group that determines my success. It's me.

1 comment:

nerinedorman said...

The best support, I've found, is from fellow authors of similar genres. Met one of my best ones at present on an online writers' forum, dragged her into one of my closed groups and, although I'm her editor at one of our publishers, I'm also really glad to call her my CP, because we're on the same page. She's worth her weight in gold. Writers' groups can and do work, but when you get to a certain point, a small network of CPs is better.