Meandering on Monday with Janet Lane Walters #amqeiring #amreading #amMFRW

The first meander is about helping other writers. I helped a friend so a very simple query for Bllos We Love Publishers. Another friend joined me in recommending her to the company that is one of our publishers. The manuscript was asked for. That makes me feel happy. Now would I recommend anyone whose work I don't know. Probably not. I feel helping other writers is some place where authors sometimes fail. I often wonder why this is. Part is because they may be worried that this person has gone further with their career than they have. I've critiqued many authors and some of them have gone on to great success. This makes me feel good. I think of myself as their mother in writing. This kind of help was given to me when I returned to writing after a ten year hiatus of working as a nurse with all the emotional impact that career has on a person. Paying forward is my goal and writing stories that become better and better as each one progresses. What about you? Do you extend your hand to other writers and feel good when they succeed?

The second meander is about visiting old friends. These friends aren't necessarily in the flesh. I re-read books and have been doing this for years. Not every book I purchase belongs to this category and they are an interesting collection of stories. I've read War and Peace twice. Anna Karenina has been re-read several times, each time with new insight. Pride and Predjudice has been read at least 19 times but the Arts and Entertainment lengthy production has taken over my reading of this book. I'm now re-reading the Foreigner series by Cherryh and finding so many new things that I didn't quite remember about the stories. And while I'm reading, I'm learning about mixing action with non-action, Maybe not learning but remembering.

The third meander is about progress. For several months I toyed with writing more than one book and I had three on the computer. But they were progressing slowly and not making the plung to completion. This isn't really the way I work but occasionally one flounders and has to find their way. I'm now concentrating on Shattered Dreams and once that's done will look at the second book in the series. As I was messing around with this story. Actually had six chapters in rough draft, I realized that though the characters had internal dilemman, there was no outer conflict that would help bring them together. Slowly this has emerged and that means tossing those six chapters aside. For the better, I believe.