Better Late Than Never

My debut novel released seven months ago today, on December 22, 2022!

And I forgot to tell people. Oops.

Of Ice and Roses released as part of a group launch - six stories from five authors, all retelling Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale “The Snow Queen”.

A year before this collection crossed my radar, my dear friend and fellow author, Joanna G Holden, wrote her own middle grade retelling that I beta read for her. As with any story, there were things I loved in her retelling and things I didn’t. I’d had enough time to think about what I would do differently with the story that when I learned of the collection, I decided to give it a shot.

The collection organizer gave me the information on July 13, 2021 and by the 17th I had a complete outline that honestly didn’t change all that much. Character motivations and the finer details of plot and world grew and evolved along the way, but I had the heart of the story solidified in under a week.

Working with other people, to deadlines I didn’t set myself, and marketing the book before it was actually written was an experience I’ll never forget - and hope to never repeat.

I learned a lot about myself between July 2021 and July 2022.

Deadlines don’t work for me

I struggle so much with deadlines. Ideally, a deadline ought to keep me focused and driven toward the goal. Instead, I feel so much pressure to only work on that project that I can’t work on it, and I can’t work on anything else without feeling guilt.

I need to write with my brain, not against it

I simply must write a few thousand words, then rewrite them, then rewrite them again before I have a solid enough foundation to continue. If I don’t stop and rework what I have, everything breaks down and I start to loathe my story.

My expectations for myself are both too high and too

That one is pretty self-explanatory.

I’m a better writer than I think I am

I’m much better at writing emotions and physical descriptions than I think I am, and, trusting my gut saves me from serious rewrites down the road. Pretty much everything I took out because I second-guessed my pacing or plot ended up back in the finished version.

Jumping around is okay

If I get stuck, I can absolutely jump ahead to the scenes that made me want to write the story in the first place. I did that with the chapters of Gemma in the spellcaster’s ice palace. Very little of it actually changed from the first draft.

Variety helps

As much as I dislike writing on my phone, I can easily get 1,500 words in a day without realizing it, especially if I use speech-to-text for narrative chunks. Writing in a notebook helps to loosen the words and get them flowing better.

Praise is just as uncomfortable as criticism

Recently, a readers group on Facebook had a post asking for standalone fantasy books. I linked Of Ice and Roses and not only did the poster read it, and “enjoy it immensely”, but they wrote a review and posted it to Amazon, Goodreads, and BookBub. Within a day or two of that, I received an email saying that Of Ice and Roses was selected to be featured in Clean Fiction Magazine’s fall edition. I was overwhelmed by the attention and was downright grumpy for a few days afterward. Accepting praise is hard when I’m used to being the invisible one, the person overlooked or lost in the crowd. It’s hard when so much of my life was spent keeping my writing under wraps because I had well-meaning family and friends who insisted I could do better than that with my life, as if my God-given passion for writing was something to be ashamed of. Once a writing project is done, I scrub it from my mind and move on. To have stories I love so dearly be brought up in conversation by complete strangers is uncomfortable, mostly because I’ve forgotten that I shared them with the world. I have no other response to their praise than complete shock and a mumbled “Thanks, I love my stories too.”

Of Ice and Roses

With each new danger, she must decide what she is willing to sacrifice for the fate of two kingdoms.