MFA Bound

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I was accepted into the MFA in Creative Writing program at Southern New Hampshire University – my classes start April 17th! I very excited about this program for several reasons:

  1. It focuses on writing popular fiction novels. When I wrote out a list of what I wanted in an MFA program this was at the top of my list. While I think the whole literary fiction v. popular fiction thing is a little odd anyway, I wanted a program that would let me work on the kinds of books I write. SNHU has tracks in contemporary, romance, YA, and speculative fiction. The only hard part is choosing which one to go with since contemporary, YA, and speculative fiction are all applicable (I have love stories too, but I don’t think in modern genre language they are “romances”) My current plan is the speculative fiction track, but I have some time before I have to make that choice.
  2. There is a built in certificate in teaching writing online. This has made the program a better sell to my current job and is something I’m interested in doing in the future so, yay!
  3. It’s a fully online program. I think it would be great to do a low-residency program, but it just wasn’t practical for me, and looking at those made me hesitant to jump in. The fully online program is something I can make fit with my life (I hope anyway!) and made me much more confident in my ability to be successful.
  4. Less academic hoop jumping! I already have two graduate degrees and one of the most difficult parts of those degrees was the thesis/dissertation process. It put a lot on students to form committees, work out how they were supposed to get approval, spend a lot of time coordinating the schedules of very busy (though awesome) faculty members, it was just a massive stressful hassle. At SNHU the thesis process is built in to the coursework – not a separate part of the program, so I’m very happy about that.

The only hard part now is waiting until April 17th!

What I want out of an MFA Program

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I recently completed my application to an online MFA program in Creative Writing. I’m a history professor with a PhD in my other life, so it’s meant explaining to others, as well as myself why I’d pursue another graduate degree in a different field. I also know that a person can become a successful writer without an MFA so again, I’ve had to think about what exactly makes me want to take on this new endeavor.

  1. I love learning and I love taking college classes. This might be the single most important reason for me. I’m one of those weird people who’d be in college classes all the time if they were free. So if I’m going to work on something it might as well be my love of writing.
  2. I want a structured way to develop my writing. Some kind of outside accountability and plan for how to progress is good for me.
  3. I want to teach creative writing. I love teaching history and I think being able to teach creative writing, my other love, would be a great opportunity. It’s probably even something I’d be able to do as an extension of my current job, so that’s a bonus as well.
  4. More tools in the toolkit. Other than one disastrous undergrad course, every time I’ve taken a writing class, I’ve come out with new ways to make my writing better.
  5. To have a writing community. Living in coastal Washington is great – but I haven’t found my writer community here, so being in a program would help me to have other people to talk with and work on writing with.

So that’s the quick version of my main reasons. There are others, but I look forward to seeing if I’m accepted to the program and to find a way forward with this new goal.

Thank you, random internet stranger

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Since writers write it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of them do some of that writing on the internet, and thank goodness for that. Multiple times in the process of self-publishing my book I’ve had questions that no one in my real life, however intelligent or well intentioned, could have answered for me, but 10 minutes and a Google search provided those answers. It makes me extremely grateful for the knowledge and willingness-to-share of the writing community online.

Need to know why your GIMP created cover won’t load properly into your Amazon KDP (publishing) account? Adjust the size of the file in GIMP – Thank you random internet stranger, we’d been swearing over that for an hour!

Need to know how to set up your listing details to get your book into the Teen & Young Adult category on Amazon? Adjust the age range and add keywords. Random internet stranger to the rescue!

I know it’s not just writers who do this – my techie maker husband finds all sorts of miraculous content online. It just makes me grateful for humans who are willing to help out people they’ll never know.

Rell, the origin story

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The paperback version of my book Rell is now available. It took some last minute graphic design wrangling with the cover (3mm has never been so frustrating), but it’s now officially out there in the world. There’s still a lot of things I want to keep doing for it in terms of promotion and just sharing it with more people, but this is a big step for me.

This book has been in my head for a long time – it started with a 15 minute break. I worked at a college library and I was sitting in a beautiful section of the stacks with my writing notebook, avoiding, as we writers often do, the project I was “supposed” to be working on. Instead I was thinking about seeing Fellowship of the Ring for the first time that weekend (I hate that this dates me, both in terms of how old I am and how long it took me to get this book out into the world, but oh well) I was wishing there were more female characters in the story, and more fantasy stories in general of the kind I liked. Of the Robin McKinley, Patricia McKillip, Tamora Pierce variety. (Now I’d add people like Kristin Cashore, Shannon Hale, and Rae Carson to that list, hooray!)

And this girl popped into my head – it was a pretty clear mental picture. She had long dark braids, this weird chainmail meets wool sweater armor, two swords, and a stubborn, quiet nature. I’ve had a fantasy world in my head since I was a teenager, and several books connected to it in different stages of incomplete, and this girl slid right in. By the end of that fifteen minute break I had a basic story idea for her figured out, and she was pretty real to me. That was the birth of Rell.

It took a long time for me to actually finish the thing. I originally envisioned it as a series, so there’s dozens of pages of backstory that ultimately ended up on the cutting room floor when I realized I wanted this to be a tighter, shorter, standalone style book. I had the fun experience of having a character who started out as a placeholder and became a beloved secondary character who may now get their own book. I had the thrill of sharing it with beta readers who loved it and encouraged me along the way. I had the painful experience many fantasy writers have of cutting off the prologue. But in the end I’m pretty happy with the novel that emerged. It’s been a rewarding process, even if it took forever.

Paperback formatting…finally!

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The paperback formatting was definitely the hardest practical part of the self-publishing process. It gave me a whole new respect for copy editors, book designers, and I can’t even imagine the skill it would have taken to create these things before the computer era.

It made me feel grateful to live in an era where the tools are available to make self-publishing possible. It will probably take a couple days before the book is live on Amazon, but it’s a relief to have it done!

Photo Credit: SweetMellowChill via Pixabay

Happiness for a reader is…

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I’m always reading multiple books at one time – at least one book for work (history or teaching), at least one fiction book, and at least one audiobook. For awhile I had so many of my library audiobook holds coming in that I was having a hard time getting through them so I stopped putting them on hold – and then I ran out of stuff to listen to. (This cycle happens with regular library books too – I’m guessing my fellow library users will find it familiar.)

So today I was left searching for a new audiobook and I found a brand new book I didn’t know was coming out by an author I really enjoy. So thank you Timberland Regional Library for the joy of Kristin Cashore’s Seasparrow – it made me a very happy reader today.

(Photo credit: cromaconceptovisual)

Celebrating a Milestone!

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For six years I’ve had an item near the top of my yearly to do list – publish Rell. The ebook is now available through Amazon – it’s taken so much work to get this far, and even if it sells 3 copies I’m so excited and a little proud of myself that I’ve finally accomplished this goal.

There’s so much of life that’s out of our control, and in a world where there’s so many books and so much media it sometimes feels a bit crazy to think adding one more story to the mix is worth the effort, but at the end of the day I wanted to share my story with more people, and this was a way to do it.

No matter what happens from this point forward, I can be excited that I met this goal and tried something new. Now, what do I do next?….

Rell updates

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So the ebook copy of the book will be available on November 1 as promised – but the hard copy may be delayed a few days. The design is done, but too be sure and for the sake of my own nervousness I want to order a print copy and make sure it looks right before I charge anyone else for it. Wish me luck!