Singer in the Shadows

Well, I finished chapter 18. It was critiqued and now I need to finish chapter 19. I can't decide if I am writing with the idea that my reader has the same grasp on the language I do, or if they have the vocabulary of a 5th grader. I am meant to begin working on chapter 19. When chapter 18 finished, the heroine had driven a knife into the chest of the bad guy. Now the question becomes is that it? Is that enough to save herself and heal, or is stabbing him a bad idea, does it have consequences that were unforeseen. It’s a paranormal romance. Vampires and witches and magic unlike the real-world system of paganism and Wicca are being used. She’s a fairly powerful witch in her own right. I just have to figure out if and what kind of consequences, there are. Maybe stabbing him actually sets into motions a backlash from prior interactions, or her own power as a healer jumps into action and fixes the damage she created? The reason the fifth-grader question came up is often during cri...

I aspire to be a writer. It’s a struggle. Finishing a novel can be a struggle all by itself, but then you have to convince someone else that the world you’ve created and the characters you’ve written about are going to be worth investing in. I understand how mainstream publishing works. It’s not about how well written the novel is. It is about how marketable the novel is. At the moment, vampires, werewolves, and all things paranormal are the hot ticket. It should make me happy. I write paranormals. It doesn’t, instead, it makes me annoyed, because now instead of having a few good paranormals to choose from there are hundreds if not thousands of really badly written stories just waiting to take readers away from good potential reads. I read paranormals. I used to read them a lot. Now though I am beginning to hate them. Maybe I should write another genre. I won't. I will continue to write paranormal novels because those are the sorts of characters that take residence inside my hea...