Meandering on Monday - Janet Lane Walters

Today's question is interesting. Do writers have periods like painters, especially like Picasso did? Looking at my own lengthy career, maybe I did. I started out in a short story period and then began writing novels. This is where the period idea came into view. When I began with novels I rather scattered my energies dabbling in a variety of fields. There were the nurse romances that sold, the mysteries that didn't until later and the fantasy/science fiction ones that didn't sell at that time. So I put those stories away and concentrated on writing nurse romances. Many of them sold. I believe five did and then I decided to return to work as a nurse to help put those children through school. Writing took a back seat to observing people. The time came and publishing had changed a lot. Things likepartials and synopsis had become the rule. So I set out to learn this and had to decide what I wanted to write. I guess that's when my period became eclectic. I'd written nurse romances because that was an area I knew. But it came to me that one not only has to look at what they know when they are writing but also what they read. Now I'm in my eclectic period and I'm also finding stories that were either completely or partially written years ago and I'm taking them out and polishing them along with penning new stories and new wods. Whether the stories are contemporary or fantasy, the worlds are ones I've created.

As to my current writing schedule'm getting ready to push Lines of Fire to completion and making notes on the two stories to follow in this trilogy. Will be sometime before I finish them. I'm also working on cleaning up The World Has Come of Age and will fit chapters of that between segments of the push.Until all the early writing mistakes are cleaned out I won't know what I have to work with other than some characters who had a story to tell years ago and somehow the carbon copy remained readable. I will see what comes of this while I continue in my eclectic period of writing.