So it goes...

I thought I'd give another writing/Dirty Shirt update because the life of a newly published author is about as fun as it gets, at least so far. I'll touch on some of what has transpired in my endless pursuit of making it to the New York Times Bestseller's list. (Enough from the peanut gallery, there!) Some of the cooler things I've found came when I googled my name and Dirty Shirt as a few keywords. Everyone should try this at some point to see what's out there about you, whether you know it or not. It was in doing this that I found my book was being offered through Omni Lit . Now, I have no idea how they got a hold of it, but near as I can tell, they harvest the data from Amazon and then sell the book. Hopefully I get a cut from it somewhere along the lines, but who knows? I trust they're in cahoots with Amazon and the authors do get some stipend, like a couple dimes. I also came across a mention of the book in the Duluth News Tribune . They gave it a ...

In the writing world, much of our time is spent waiting. Waiting on inspiration, waiting on clarity, waiting on edits, waiting on submission responses. When I took my first adult education writing course called Writing from your life , I was thrilled to be writing and getting feedback. So, what did I do right after that? Waited almost two years to take my second class - the AllWriters' Wednesday Night Workshop . Sometimes waiting is put on us, other times we put it on ourselves. These past couple of months I was waiting to find out if my latest article submission on muskie fishing was accepted to MidWest Outdoors Magazine . They don't really reply if you are accepted or not, a check just shows up in your mailbox one day. When my article wasn't in the December issue, I assumed if I waited another month, it would be in January issue. Of course, it wasn't, so now I wait again to see if it will be placed in February or maybe even later in the year, where it fits the open ...

Some notes and thoughts about life in the writing lane.  I continue to work through what I'd like to call the "final unprofessional edit" of my BWCA book with my Thursday night colleagues at AllWriters . We have one week left in this session and then another starts up on May 30th and runs 12 weeks. As I've mentioned before, this run-through has been really good. It is giving a (somewhat) objective audience a start-to-finish look at the book. At the same time, this group is probably the most critical group the book will ever see, from a reader's standpoint. This gives the book a thorough check for facts, timelines, content, clarity and structure. In the class we've actually had a couple of students (there's 5 of us) finish their "final unprofessional edit." One has moved on to her next book and another has decided to run through the start again. We writers are nothing if not thorough. We're like compulsive fire-pokers, we just keep futzin...