Awards Eligibility 2021

Thanks to the very supportive speculative fiction writer community online, I'm now aware that anything published in 2021 is eligible for awards season! I'm still brand new to this and don't completely understand it, but since I had my very first fiction publication this year, I'm creating this post to share on Twitter.

Speculative Short Story publication - August 2021: "Yoko and the Sunbeam Garden" by Meg Murray in the anthology GROWTH from TL;DR Press.

Links here: Amazon paperback or Kindle version 

Thank you for your support, readers! 

Mid-Month NaNoWriMo 2021 Update

National Novel Writing Month is halfway done! Or there's halfway to go depending on your outlook...

Lessons I'm learning about myself as a writer during this year's NaNoWriMo effort:

- I draft much better when I'm confident in the outline of the story.

- I still discover things about my characters as I'm writing even if I have a detailed plot & character arc outline.

- Having a writing community (or multiple communities) is really encouraging!

- Visual graphs of my progress help to keep me going.

I'm having a lot of fun writing this draft of my novel. I put it away for all of 2020 because...pandemic / quarantine / moving across states / finishing college / parenting / homeschooling... But reconnecting with virtual writing groups as well as having two short stories published gave me the boost I needed to come back to the novel. Inspired by other writers online, I created a mood board for the novel and I'm tracking my word count progress on Twitter.

How I'm doing so far:

I'm approaching the 25% mark in the outline so it looks like this draft will end up at 100k words when it's finished.

Happy writing, everyone!

- Meg

NaNoWriMo 2021

I decided to join NaNoWriMo this year at the last minute as a way to motivate myself to complete the beta draft of my novel manuscript. Over the summer, I fixed up the outline and filled in all of the plot holes in the messy Franken-draft. I workshopped various chapters from this draft with my Atlanta critique group, but never had a cohesive story. With the overhaul of the outline, I had to move some chapters around, condense the overall timeline, and cut a bunch of scenes (some of which could be saved for a potential sequel novel).

So my NaNo goal is to edit/write at least 1667 words/day (50,000 words/month), but hopefully more. I have 44 chapters in the novel, so if I can get one or two chapters written (or rewritten) per day, that would be a great pace to having an actual completed manuscript that I could send to beta readers!! I finished Chapter 1 today and began to write (the brand-new) Chapter 2...

Here's the NaNoWriMo site if you'd like more info: https://nanowrimo.org/

Happy writing, Everyone!

--Meg