Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing
Have we really been blogging this long?
Wow—one hundred blog posts. Who knew we’ve been blogging with A4A this long? We certainly didn’t. This milestone came as a surprise while we were scheduling out other posts in Blogger, but we thought we’d take a look back at our blogging journey.
It’s harder than we thought!
Let me first start by saying, before we started this company, none of us had regularly blogged…or in my case, blogged at all. It’s certainly a lot harder to come up with at least forty-nine posts to go out on a weekly basis (thirty-nine if you take out our regularly scheduled author interviews for each book that goes out) that are interesting, informative and helpful, and most of all, engaging for both burgeoning authors and authors who have been in the game longer than we have.
I can say the hardest things for me are making sure that I have a firm knowledge base for any post that we’re writing about before any of the posts get written and finding the time to make sure that I do.
But, to quote Moira Rose from one of my favorite shows, Schitt’s Creek, “One must champion oneself and say, ‘I am ready for this.’”
And we were ready to do it, and we are ready to continue on for years to come as Authors 4 Authors Publishing continues to flourish and grow.
So. Many. Series.
Over the two years that we’ve been blogging, we’ve covered so many topics, but the series tend to be our favorite because we can go further in depth than just a one-off post. Here are the series that we’ve covered over the years; you’ll notice that only some of them have links to them, and those are the ones with introduction posts that can easily link the rest of the series to them.
- Feminine genres
- Speculative fiction genres
- Points of view
- Types of Characters
- Character Arcs
- Publishing
- Worldbuilding
- New Authors
- Misused advice
By far our longest series was our worldbuilding one, coming in at a whopping eighteen posts. For those keeping track, that’s almost five months’ worth of blog posts. It was certainly the one that I learned the most from because I had to research every element mentioned within the posts to make sure I wasn’t leading any writers astray with thinking I knew everything. Spoiler alert: I didn’t. And I still don’t, because the moment you think you’ve stopped learning is the moment you need to learn the most.
Do we have a favorite?
Well, Sweetheart, Mama never has favorites. Who am I kidding? Of course, we have favorites. I have a couple of favorites, actually. I can’t speak much for my delightful coworkers, but my personal favorites to write were:
- Writing Stigmas– This post was very far outside of my comfort zone; I don’t really write about social trends, nor do I write much about the romance genres. It was certainly an interesting experience defending a genre I’m not a particular fan of myself (not because I think romance is a bad genre, but because I don’t really like reading about lovey feels).
- You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?– This was one of the posts in our worldbuilding series. I think this one was the one that I learned the most while researching because I had never heard of a lot of the lifespan traditions that I covered before I started writing it.
- This Means War!– This was another one from our worldbuilding series, but I like it for reasons you might not realize: it allowed me to rely more on my own knowledge for this one. Before realizing the error of my ways, I was studying to be a history teacher in secondary education, so it was nice to stretch some of those history muscles again.
My absolute favorite to read is in our Misused advice series, where we dispel commonly used writing advice that has turned away from its original meaning and is being used incorrectly. This piece was written by our CAO and co-founder, B. C. Marine, on not having prologues. Unfortunately for you dear readers, it doesn’t come out for a few more weeks. I have never laughed so hard reading one of our posts, and I’ll be sure to link it here once the post has dropped.
The series that I’m personally most excited about is our misused advice series. In these, as mentioned above, we explore advice that has good intentions at its origin but has evolved into something either misused or something inviolable. We’re only doing one of these posts a month to break up our series—something we learned with our worldbuilding series, the longer the series, the harder it is to keep readers engaged—and give us time to research the origins of each piece of advice we cover.
So far, we only have two posts out, but they’re whoppers and things that writers don’t really like to hear. First, we covered Kill Your Darlings, which talks about how it’s not about killing off your characters, but about getting rid of scenes that you absolutely fell in love with but do nothing to serve the story. Second, we covered Show, Don’t Tell, in which we dispel the idea that every single thing needs to be spelled out, which can really drag down the pacing of a story.
Join us next week for the next installment of our misused advice series, where guest poster and A4A author, Lisa Borne Graves, covers limiting your points of view, and in two weeks for the resumption of our new authors series, where we’ll talk about themes.
Let's Keep in Touch!
Can't wait? Check out our website for available books!
No comments:
Post a Comment