[Writing Post] Galley HO!

It’s Wednesday and I should get back on track with blog posts.

There’s been a lot of “should” in my brain this past week. Things I “Should” be doing, and with reason. I’ve had to take a few days to deal with “book brain” – that time where you flush the book you just finished out of your mind before starting the next project.

Unfortunately, when I looked at the next project on deck, I let myself get a bit overwhelmed – it’s a rewrite and there are a lot of notes. So looking at it, trying to figure out where to start on it just made my brain run and hide and find any reason to procrastinate on starting the project -including other writing-related work. Such as going over the galleys for an anthology I’m going to be in soon called Dirty Magick: New Orleans.

This is a small press anthology put out by Charlie Brown of Lucky Mojo Press. It’s an alternate universe series of anthologies where the world is the same except there’s now magic – and the problems that going along with mystical power being let loose upon the world. The anthologies each focus on a specific city – this one was New Orleans. I’ll admit I’ve never been there (and now I really want to go). Brown put some points in his guidelines to steer those of us who’ve only seen New Orleans on TV away from some misconceptions. I kinda took that as a challenge. This is what I do… you tell me what the clichés are, or what most people will do with a theme, and I’ll find a way to incorporate those “creatively”.

And thanks to Julia Mandala’s help (she used to live in NOLA) and is a good friend and beta reader/editor. Not only did I sell the story, I’m honored and astonished to have the first story in the anthology. I can’t wait for it to come out, because when I was reading through the story to check for any last minutes typos, I almost forgot to be that specific I was just reading the story. That’s huge for me – and it’s something I also noticed with the novel when I was inputting the last of the edits – there were chunks where there were no notes during the read aloud – which meant I was just reading the story and not being super critical of my own work. HUGE step.

So, I’ll let you know when things start coming out. I’m hoping the anthology will be out before my next show. The novel still has some other factors beyond my control. I hope you find these next stories entertaining, too.

Tags: editing, Julia Mandala, new orleans, procrastinating, rewriting, Writing