April Writing Goals

I have goals for April and they are big! I want to edit four chapters from my current work in progress, Project Prehistory, and I want to edit two short stories. I wrote ten short stories during NaNoWriMo last November, and two of them were so good that I would like to publish them this year. I don't think I'll be able to get the short stories ready for publication in April, but I want to at least get them ready for beta readers.

You can find out more about my April writing goals from this Youtube video:

Book Review: The Midwife by Tricia Cresswell

The Midwife by Tricia Cresswell

Book Title: The Midwife
Author: Tricia Cresswell
Genre: Historical fiction
Published: February 17, 2022 by Pan Macmillan
337 pages
My rating: 3/5

“The woman lay curled in the heather, her skin blue-white against the frost. She was so cold to John Elliott’s first touch; so certainly dead, that the sound of her breathing was shocking.”

1838. A woman is found naked and near death on the Northumberland moors. She has no memory of who she is, but she can still remember how to help a woman in labor. She is named Joanna, later Mrs Sharp, and becomes a nurse and a midwife in the village of Alnwick in Northumberland. A few years later in London, Dr Borthwick works as an accoucheur, a male midwife, helping women from the homes of the high society to the slums of the Devil’s Acre.

Starting the Editing Process for Draft Four (Writing Vlog #3)

Time for another writing update! My current work in process (working title Project Prehistory) is a coming-of-age story set in a prehistoric matriarchal society. I've been writing and editing it for years, and this year, it's time for the fourth draft.

So far this year I’ve...

• Read the third draft of Project Prehistory (fast read)
• Read the third draft again (more thorough read)
• Read through beta reader feedback
• Tried to solve the mess that is chapters 4-13
• Read the third draft for the third time (nit-picky delete-everything-that-doesn’t-belong read)
• Transferred my notes to the Word document
• Transferred the beta reader feedback to the Word document

This week, I finally started revising the text. My goal is to get one chapter edited per week. If I can do that, I should be able to finish the fourth draft before Christmas.

If you want to see a more detailed depiction of what my week of editing looked like, check the Youtube video above!

Author interview with Amanda Darcy

Amanda Darcy's debut novel Of Love and Beer was published March 12, 2024. You can find my review of the book here. Read more about her book, her thoughts on writing and self-publishing, and what she's working on next!

Your debut novel Of Love & Beer is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Why did you choose to write a retelling and why specifically Pride and Prejudice?

This actually starts with Pride and Prejudice. Every time I’ve read it, or any of Jane Austen’s novels (and I’ve reread them a lot), I’ve always spent days afterwards thinking about how a modern version might go. But until recently, I didn’t have the confidence to try it. About five years ago, things go so chaotic with politics that I got overwhelmed. I think now it was a kind of depression I went into, but it manifested by me turning away from all media except Pride and Prejudice variations which I had recently discovered. After reading nothing but what is essentially Jane Austen fan fiction for nearly six months, I woke up one day and just thought, “I could do this. I could write an Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy story.” For a while I debated whether to do a variation set in the Regency period like most of the books I’d read, or to do a retelling. The retelling won out partly because I’d been thinking of that for so many years, and partly because since I’d never written a romance novel before, I mistakenly thought it’d be easier to already have a basic structure and plot points to follow.

Book Review: Of Love and Beer by Amanda Darcy

Of Love and Beer by Amanda Darcy

Book Title: Of Love and Beer
Author: Amanda Darcy
Genre: Contemporary romance, Jane Austen retelling
Published: March 12, 2024
324 pages
My rating: 5/5

“If there was one thing Ellis could trust, it was her first impressions, and things were not looking good for Wallace. She’d always had a knack for sizing people up quickly, but she’d recently had the opportunity to hone her skills. Since June, when her partner announced his plans to retire, every beer loving Lothario in a thirty-mile radius had shown up at the brewery thinking that if they bought Barney out, they’d get to plant themselves behind the bar and “pick up chicks.””

Craft Brewer Ellis Bourne has two problems: avoiding the suitors her match-making mother thrusts upon her and finding a new business partner. Luckily for her, she knows she can always trust her first impressions. So when a handsome vintner Dean Pembrook insults her, she knows exactly what to think of him. That is until Dean’s friend shows interest in her business, and she’s stuck trying to ignore Dean and trying to get his friend invest in her small-town brewery.

How to Write a Synopsis for Your Novel

Did you know that you need a synopsis if you plan to publish traditionally and query for an agent?

I wrote a synopsis for my current work in progress, Project Prehistory, a year ago while working on the third draft. That synopsis is of course not query-ready, as the novel will undergo some major changes yet, but I found it a good exercise to see what the essence of the story was and how I could condense it into a short summary. This is what makes a synopsis a helpful tool for indie authors as well! You get to see the “bare bones” of the story, and that can help you identify if there are any problems in your novel. Or if you’re a plotter, you can write a synopsis already in the planning phase, before writing a more detailed scene list and starting to draft the novel.

February Wrap-Up and March Goals

February reads

February Wrap-Up

• Finished: 8
• Started but not finished: 3
• Total pages read: 1,824
• Average rating: 3.875

Another great month with eight finished books and closer to two thousand pages read. I don't think the average rating accurately reflects how good this month was. That's because I read several books of ancient philosophy, which is not my favorite genre. The other books, however, I loved a lot.