Christy Shuler

 Hallelujah! Fall is finally,  finally here and after months of miserable summer heat, my writer heart is singing praises for this beautiful October weather. I don't know about you, but my creativity always goes into hibernation in the summer and reawakens in the fall. Perhaps it's my minds way of preparing for what I like to think of as the writer's version of a marathon. Yes, that's right. I'm talking about  NaNoWriMo . If you've never heard of National Novel Writing Month, I'll give you the gist. Every November, participants undertake a complete rough draft of a brand new novel. In order to "win," your manuscript must reach 50,000 words. And while the prize consists mostly of bragging rights and a general feeling of achievement, Scrivener does offer a 50% discount to verified winners.  While this year will be only my second to participate, I resolved after last years win to commit every year going forward. For me, NaNoWriMo is a perfect excuse t...

Happy blog hop day everyone and thank you so much for stopping by mine. By the time you're reading this, we will be well into the month of July and I will have officially begun my Camp NaNoWriMo project. I'm writing this post at the end of June while preparing my plan of attack over the next 31 days in which I plan to write my first ever spec script for television. If you're not familiar with Camp NaNoWriMo, you can check out this blog post where I go into more detail. In essence, it's a month where writers worldwide dedicate themselves to a particular project of their choosing. But personally, I like to think of it as a giant pause button. NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo have become my sole excuse to put down my novel with its seemingly endless revisions and pause for a month to focus on something new. Somehow doing so under the established framework of NaNoWriMo is easier for me than simply picking a random month of my own choosing, which I know I would never do if...

Happy blog hop day, everyone! I hope that your writing has been both fun and inspired. While I missed last month's hop, I have been in the thick of what will (hopefully) be my final round of revisions before querying my current novel. Hooray! In case you missed my video recapping my first beta reader experience , my novel has undergone a couple of major changes these past few months due to the feedback I received. It was an incredible learning opportunity for me. I truly believe that, thanks to my beta readers, I was able to resolve issues that would almost certainly have come back to bite me during the querying process. Whether I was saved from agent rejections remains to be seen, however, through this process I learned things about my writing and this story specifically, that I would not have otherwise. And for this reason, I highly recommend reaching out to beta readers before considering querying agents. That being said, I wanted to gather my thoughts into a post that co...

As the year comes to a close, I think it's important to reflect not only on our goals for the upcoming year, but to look back on our achievements in the last. While not everyone may believe in the idea of the new year's "resolutions," I've personally found them to be a great tracking tool. Not only do they inspire me to try new things and seek out new potential growth opportunities, but they help me look back on the areas in which I've improved. These areas I might not have even realized, if it weren't for the annual ritual of reflection and planning. At the beginning of 2019 I set out to connect the dots ; my word of the year being "connect." My intention was to assess every new aspiration I had started in my previous year of "fulfillment" and find a way to sustain these new passions of mine by creating a schedule that would establish a sense of order between the seemingly random ventures I had begun. My word of the year also doub...

This year I decided to participate in my first-ever NaNoWriMo, which means, in the month of November I will be attempting to write the entire first draft of a brand new novel. Since I consider myself a strong Plotter with a few Pantser tendencies sprinkled in, I decided to take the month of October to prep and plan for this endeavor. If you missed it, check out my Preptober Planning Essentials blog where I shared all of my strategies on plotting for NaNoWriMo. But throughout all of my novel prep, I would be remiss if I didn't share some of the more practical strategies that I am devising to be sure that I win NaNoWriMo. The following are my survival kit throughout the month of November: Writeordie.com - I have always been fascinated by the concept of this writing app. If you've never heard of it, it is essentially a tool for writers to keep you typing without pause. There are settings you can choose to decide how many words you want to write within a set amount of time....

This is a companion post that I created to share the resources I discussed in my NaNoWriMo Prep Checklist video on my YouTube channel. If you haven't seen the video, I have it embedded below.  Preptober is finally upon us! Well, maybe not officially, but I couldn't bring myself to wait another day to share all of my planning and resources in preparation for NaNoWriMo 2019. If you're unaware, NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month, is the one month a year where writers all the over world challenge themselves to complete a finished rough draft of a new novel within 30 days. October, also referred to as Preptober, is the month of preparations before the event, where writers decide their story idea and flesh it out. It's also a great time to get your personal scheduled squared away so you can plan for maximum efficiency throughout November. This is my first year to participate, outside of Camp NaNoWriMo, and I am beyond excited to let a new spark of an idea c...

I recently attended my very first writer's conference and let me tell you, it was a decision years in the making. For so long I had entertained the idea. I'd heard such great stories from other writers about how much there is to learn and all of the great connections one can make. Still, whenever it came time to purchase a ticket, I always held myself back. If you are anything like me, an introvert with socially anxious tendencies, then the idea of a writer's conference probably sends a chill down your spine. Socializing with a large group of strangers, participating in discussions, and generally putting yourself,  not to mention your work , out there can be intimidating. However, over the years I've found that preparation is an excellent coping strategy for such nerves and will ultimately ensure a much more positive and productive experience. It was through my preparation that I ended up having the BEST time. Talking to agents, participating in sessions, and making s...

I remember July of 2018 quite vividly. I had just started my YouTube channel in the hopes of putting myself "out there" in the writing community and meeting other writers in the process. What was unique about July is that I noticed many of the writers in the "authortube" community posting vlogs of something called Camp NaNoWriMo. To be honest with you, I had no idea what this was. I had heard of people tossing around the words nano this and nano that. I knew it had something to do with novel writing and these writers online had a genuine enthusiasm for it, so my interest was peaked. In case you aren't familiar, I'll start with the basics. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which happens every year in November. The intention is that writers can push themselves to achieve the goal of writing an entire novel (or, at least, 50,000 words) in just thirty days. People that would otherwise struggle to self-motivate and stay on course can be...

Today I'm giving an update on the progress of the second draft of my debut novel!  I'm having so much fun as I'm starting to discuss my work in progress more and get more comfortable with sharing details. In the video I talk about the first novel I wrote and how my journey with that project influenced the mindset that I'm in now on my second.

I was so excited to be able to answer a writing tag on my very own channel. Who doesn't enjoy talking about writing, writing ideas and their current project? The Story Ideas Writing Tag was originally created by Bethany Atazadeh and Brooke Passmore.

Hi, Guys! In this video I'm sharing my progress on my annual reading goal. How many books did I finish this quarter? Watch to find out!

There's a topic that's been on my chest for awhile now that I felt like I should finally talk about. That is the subject of word count. In school I had a class where we were required to write a complete novel at 50,000 words. The idea was that if we had a completed novel under our belts we could either revise and add more to it later or learn from the process for future work. As it turned out, I really enjoyed writing mine and decided I wasn't finished with it. Based on what everyone was saying, I knew that I had a lot of work to do to get it "ready." I still remember a talk I had with a colleague awhile back who shall also remain nameless. I told him I had written a book and he asked how many pages it was. 255, I replied. 55,000 words. He shrugged, unimpressed. "Oh, so a short story." Mind you, he was not a writer. In that moment, I felt a strong urge to question him on his literary merits. But I remained calm. I simply assumed that I had to...

During the last couple months of 2014, I decided to take a bit of a breather. Sometimes when you're trying so hard to finish a project or to make something happen (like get an agent, for example) it begins to feel as if you're banging your head against the wall. It's nice to take a step back and allow myself the time to reflect on what I'm trying to achieve. I don't just want to land any agent and I don't just want to write any kind of book. I want my writing to mean something to someone and I want to find an agent who believes in me. During my hiatus I also had the time to do a lot of reading, which seems to appear on my list of resolutions year after year. I just finished reading the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth and can't say that my mind has truly let go of that heart-wrenching ending yet: the sign of a really great book. So for this year, I decided to make a list of Writing Resolutions. I am going to avoid being overly ambitious and focus ...

You know the saying, her bark was worse than her bite? Well let me tell you something. When I started writing for my student newspaper's Arts & Entertainment section, I was eager to jump in head first. The only problem was that the ideas I was pitching either weren't accepted by my editor or once I'd finished writing them, they got rejected for the print version. I was like a little yapping dog who wanted to play, but no one would take me seriously. Don't get me wrong, a few of them did finally make it to print, and I did understand that the A&E section had a huge space issue. Most of it usually went to the "hardcore" news, not so much what movies people were watching that weekend. But when I started to analyze the pieces that were making it into the paper, I realized that most of them were written by a select handful of writers who had more...bite... than I did. What I mean by that is they had this sort of sharp wit and sarcasm that I felt that...

I've seen a lot of writers participating in this monthly goal challenge and thought I'd weigh in. Not only is it fun to share, but declaring your goals publicly keeps you somewhat accountable as well. This month I'd like to get 1/3 of the way through the first draft of my novel. Is it a lofty goal? I'm not sure...I've known other writers who seem to be able to write an entire draft in a weekend flat and sometimes I feel a bit on a slow side. However, since writing is not my full time job I feel that 3 months is a decent goal for me. Since some writing days are much more productive than others, this allows me those occasions when writing day are disturbed or completed thrown out the window. Hey, life happens.  What's your September goal? I'm also very curious to know how quickly everyone else writes. Is 3 months for a first draft reasonable?

I've officially started the process of plotting my second novel. Hold your applause, please. After a bit of a break, I am excited to get back into the swing of writing again. After recently finishing what I hoped would be the last revision of my first novel, I was a little fried, to be honest. I thought I'd spend some time in research mode: reading more books, learning more about the publishing industry and finding other writers out there who were in the same sort of "limbo" that I am. (Side note: If you are one of them, please hit me up! I'm anxious to hear about your journey and if you are having any luck getting published!) I've also been sending queries to literary agents. Searching for the right agent seems to be a full time job in and of itself, but I'm still hopeful that I will connect with an agent when the time is right. Anyway, I decided to take a break from my "break" and get back into writing. :) I'm very excited about th...

I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I've only recently discovered the emerging literary genre of new adult fiction. I'm more embarrassed to admit that I've accidentally written one. What is new adult, you ask? Let me go back a couple of years ago to a fiction writing class I'd had in college. We had each just begun outlining our novels and I had grappled with the idea of a protagonist in her later teens just on the cusp of adulthood. Could I do this? Since young adult fiction had been (and still is) so wildly popular to all ages, I knew just how many stories were out there about young girls in high school. But a girl entering college? No one was doing this. Would anyone want to read my story about a girl trying to "figure things out" in the adult world? Would younger audiences relate to her? I didn't think an older demographic would fit my story, but there didn't seem to be an in between. I'll have to change her age,  I thought to myself...

Today is a writing day and, unfortunately, a rather frustrating one. Having just complete my revision of the first draft of my novel, I have come to the conclusion that it is much too short. I won't tell you how short, because it will embarrass me. But it seems, in my brutal attempt at "trimming the fat" I may have trimmed away about 15,000 words. Though so far, I've never heard of an author coming up short in content, I'm hoping I'm not alone. I feel that my problem is that although I am writing a novel, in my mind I am writing a screenplay. I find myself so concerned with dialogue, that I miss out on the imagery and the inner monologue. This is my struggle. Sigh. So now begins the revision of my revision. In this stage, I will read my revision, analyze what needs to be added and hopefully, end up with enough words that I don't embarrass myself when sending it to a literary agent. Wish me luck!