This month cynthiaharrison.com is 23 years old. Here’s how it looked back when I still called it A Writer’s Diary. BTW, you can read my novel GYPSY free on Kindle. And thanks for reading.
This years the blog has gone through some changes. For one thing I moved my website to another platform but kept the big, fat, full of juicy archives, blog on Word Press. Nobody else had the bandwidth to support all my posts. It seems to be working out.
Another writer thing I did this year was volunteer for my Florida Sisters in Crime chapter on the Gulf Coast. I agreed to become VP for a year. And that year is winding down. The friendships I made will remain, however.
I have been in many writing groups through the years. The best have been key to me getting published, finding opportunities to talk about writing to an interested audience, and sell my books to the public. It’s also a good way for we hermit writers to find our people. We don’t necessarily want to be hermits, but writing books takes a long time. Not a lot of people who are not writers understand why you spend every day in your writing room. There’s a magic flow that only other writers will understand. I have friends who are not writers, of course. I do take days off ! But I always try to be here, writing. Truth is, it takes me hours to write a single page. It takes me less than a minute to read a page. So it’s good to have friends, too. And the bonus: they will help you with revision. Just as you will help them.
One of my earlier writer’s groups was with the Detroit chapter of Romance Writers of American. In that group, another member told me about an e-publisher who was looking for books like mine. That was the Wild Rose Press, who are still my publisher, many books later. When I flowed into romantic suspense, they kept publishing me. And now I am on to a third genre, historical romance. I couldn’t do this with a traditional publisher. They like novelists to stay in their lane.
So, joining a writing group comes with perks like critique groups, friends who know what your life looks like, friends who recommend publishers and a group of people willing to share other writing and publishing knowledge, like conferences. Plus you get folk to hang with at the really big conferences. Being an officer in a writing organization takes you even deeper into the brass tacks of what it takes to become a published writer. It’s a lot. But it’s worth it.
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