So I had this insane idea to start a blog… Before that, I had another insane idea that I would write a book. Now here I am writing to no one in particular, attempting to gain an audience of readers to share my experience with the entire process. And by entire process, I mean everything from starting a blog, engaging in social media (I do not currently have any FB, twitter, youtube, myspace, etc.) to the trials and tribulations (cliche I know) of writing a book, promoting it, and getting it published.
As I am writing this, I do not even have a blogging page yet (obviously I do now cause you are reading this), but I have started my book at least. Currently sitting around 120K words. In all honesty, quite a bit of those words will be in subsequent books in my series. I have roughly 35K words in the first part of the first book. So its not quite the beginning, but near enough. (Epic fantasy here I come)
Anywho, before I get into any of that, I guess I should introduce myself. Hi, my name is Kristol and I am an aspiring sci-fi author who is probably deluding herself.
I currently have a demanding job to top this all off. I am a Business Manager for a call center company, and the short of it is I deal with any financial impacting areas of the company which means long days and working weekends. I currently have a love/hate relationship with excel whom rules my working world.
I guess I should be a little more personal, but forgive me if it scares the crap out of me. I am not one to share my life with people. So here goes…
I am a book worm. Probably more like a giant earth worm or something from Dune to be honest. I am constantly reading something. I cannot stand to not be immersed in some new world or story. I have entirely too many books, in the range of 1K not including my newest digital library collection. No, not all of them are fiction, but a vast majority are.
I would say that my addiction started when Pizza Hut came to my school when I was younger and started the “Book It” program. In case you are not familiar with it, the kids would get a button/lapel pin (which, by the way, is an extremely hard to find word when you have no clue what to call it. Nix google and bing, yahoo to the rescue) and it had places to stick a star for each book that you read. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but either the kid that read the most, or gained a certain amount of stars, would receive a free pizza. I won a pizza every year for 4 years straight until I moved away from that school.
Even before that I loved to read. One of my favorite all time books is “The Unicorn who had no Horn”. I still remember it vividly. The unicorn had to go find its horn, and to gain a horn it had to go to a place with a bunch of crystals. The crystal grew into its horn. Sounds cheesy but it was magical for me. It’s on Amazon… I need to buy it.
I can’t remember the name of most of the other books, but if I ever saw them again I would snatch them up in a heartbeat. Specifically there was this woman who took everything literally, she was told to ‘dress the tree’ or maybe it was ‘dress the bird’ for Christmas and she put food on the tree or clothes on the turkey – horrible memory-lane here. She was always causing messes. I remember she had frazzled brown hair but thats about it. But I digress.
Besides being a Shai-Hulud, who strives to only eat rabbit food (vegan sometimes raw), I also like playing console/computer games. That is for another post I believe, but needless to say, I grew up in the world of Atari – blowing up animals in the earth with a bicycle pump would have been at the top of my resume, although my mom was, ashamedly, a thousand time better than me – which progressed to double jumping and rail gun head shots and now that I am older, Bethesda has my heart – choose any of their titles, and I have probably over-played that game.
So back to the point. Blog, write book, blog some more, edit book, blog that, find an agent???, maybe some blogs there, publish, blog about that, get my first copy of my first book, do a happy dance blog, sell books, blog about pains there, and make billions of dollars… probably won’t be blogging at that point.
First things first. Set up new gmail account and got a blogspot address. If you are here, obviously you know, but it is Lenaeu.blogspot.com. Yay! Boo to the 50 other names I came up with already being taken. And it is quite ugly as it stands – not sure if this will be the final name of the world in my book, and I am a horrible design artist. So first things first, I will be making it prettier ASAP. Of course I will pin it to my FWO account.
Did I forget to mention that? I am currently involved with Fantasy-writers.org. They are a wonderful group of people that help writers with critiques and writing tips/tools/techniques. I’ve been with the site since August 2015, and the people there are absolutely fabulous. Some are way above my head, but they are kind and gentle and rarely bite. So thats good. I decided to stick with this group as some other sites are not as well moderated and opinions run a bit too high for my liking.
So. What next?
No clue.
But rest assured, I am 100% dedicated to writing my book. And if that means I have to do a blog, book someones face, and sing like a canary, then I guess that is what I will be doing. Have I mentioned that I really do not like social media? Maybe the hint was the fact that I have never had an account before… or that I am a private person… or that I have never had a blog or video submitted to youtube. Or maybe it was the fact that I am a sandworm… Er… bookworm?
I don’t even know if this is considered too long of a post for a blog. Sorry if it was. But then again, look at me being all open…
If you are still reading this, then hoorah for me, maybe not you, although that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see you back here. Thanks for reading the insane thoughts of a crazy lady. Maybe one day these thoughts will put some money in my pocket.
Here’s to being certifiable.