Aspiring Novelists

Last month  I discovered that I tend to focus on the negative instead of the positive. This revelation came to me  during one of my son's soccer games, and it hit with all the force of a freight train.   After the game he asked if I noticed his assist.  I told him that I did, and it was good, but he needed to improve his touches.  He shrugged and said, "It figures, you always notice what I don't do." I would have debated the point, but the truth is, he wasn't far off the mark.  If he brings home a report card with all A's and one B, I zero in on the lower grade. After giving this a lot of thought, I realized that this negativity also leaks into my writing. As many of you know, I'm a member of some online critique sites.  When I first began my novel three years ago, I received a lot of negative feedback on my work.  Although it upset me a little, in retrospect, I expected nothing less.  After all, I was a fledgling fiction write...

This is a post for Alex J. Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Group Hello Everyone,  I hope life is treating you well.  It seems hard to believe that we are already into February.  Where the heck did the time go?  I hoped to complete four chapters of my novel last month.  Instead, I only got through two.  At this pace I'll never get to the end.   When I complained about this to my husband, he accused me of holding back because I was scared of the unknown. Although I denied it, gave lots of reasons I had not completed my monthly goal, somewhere deep inside I knew he spoke the truth.        When I first began the novelist's journey, my head was in the clouds.  I effortlessly wrote and published a couple of short stories and my thesis was also in print.  Then I came up with the idea for my book, and at the time, thought it was so good that an agent would beg to see it.  I imagined myself as the next Stephen...