Writer Stuff – LL Nelson https://www.llnelsonauthor.com Author Sat, 11 Jun 2022 03:56:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 Writing and Publishing in the time of COVID-19 https://www.llnelsonauthor.com/writing-and-publishing-in-the-time-of-covid-19/ https://www.llnelsonauthor.com/writing-and-publishing-in-the-time-of-covid-19/#respond Sun, 10 May 2020 14:49:23 +0000 https://www.llnelsonauthor.com/?p=120 Continue reading "Writing and Publishing in the time of COVID-19"

]]> Well, March and April were not what expected when I woke up to 2020 back in January. It’s only May and I feel like I’ve already seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good: 1) I made the first profits of my writing career – $0.98! 2) I got to spend more time with my family! 3) I got a taste of what working at home would be like (and I actually like it!)

The bad: 1) The two poetry anthologies I was in were unpublished in April by the publisher, each being out for less than a year. 2) COVID-19 (enough said).

The ugly (or rather the uncomfortable): 1) The chaos and coming face-to-face with the unknown when you are a planner at heart.

That said, if the last two months have taught me something (or re-taught), it’s that there are silver linings to most every bad or uncomfortable situation. COVID-19 is bad, but it’s given me time with my family and time to explore what working at home would be like.

The two anthologies I was in getting unpublished by the publisher with little reason or notice is bad, but I got all of the rights back (yay!) and I can use those poems in different ways in the future. And even though I have no hard feelings toward the publisher (publishing is a hard profession, y’all.) it’s made me realize that self-publishing is probably the route I want to take in the future – even if it might be longer or full of more learning curves (at least for me).

For example, two of those poems are part of the lore in (one of) my fantasy worlds. So those will likely end up as freebie material for people check out here on my website. I’ll likely put up other stuff too, like character bios and scenes/vignettes that don’t make it into the stories. We’ll see. Such is the life of someone trying to figure out self-publishing.

]]> https://www.llnelsonauthor.com/writing-and-publishing-in-the-time-of-covid-19/feed/ 0 June 30th, 2019 – or the day I officially became a published author https://www.llnelsonauthor.com/hello-world/ https://www.llnelsonauthor.com/hello-world/#respond Wed, 05 Jun 2019 04:50:17 +0000 https://www.llnelsonauthor.com/?p=1 Continue reading "June 30th, 2019 – or the day I officially became a published author"

]]>

Hi y’all!

It’s June 30th, 2019 and as of today, I can officially say that I am a published author. Organic Ink Volume 1 went live today (despite some hiccups, it seems, on Amazon’s side) and in that poetry anthology, I have four poems under my (quasi) pseudonym – L. L. Nelson.

The goal – and dream – of being published is something that I’ve had since I was twelve and wrote an (unintentionally) cheesy historical romance that I was super proud of. At fourteen, I wrote a letter to myself (as part of a youth activity in my church) listing out the goals that I wanted to accomplish by the time I was eighteen. The first goal in the letter was to publish my story. While that story is still in my drafts (after a massive overhaul due to learning more about how to write a story over the years), the goal of writing and publishing something stayed with me over the years and I continued to dabble in it as I got older.

Fast forward to January of this year when I saw that a friend from college had published a clean romance novel that was really good and getting excellent reviews on Amazon. Surprised (because I hadn’t known she was a writer) and knowing that I still had that dream, I decided that 2019 would be the year that I finally took my writing seriously and published something.  Even if it was small and just a baby step toward my bigger goals.

So I joined groups of other authors, wrote, edited, and did the scariest thing of all – submitted a few poems to the Organic Ink anthology.

And now I’m here (surprisingly faster than I thought I would be). There are officially e-books and physical books with my writing in them. Which is exciting.

This is by no means an ‘I finally made it and now I’m resting on my laurels‘ post. No way. I still have a ways to go until I reach my ultimate writing goals. But this is a journey and this is the first step.

 

]]> https://www.llnelsonauthor.com/hello-world/feed/ 0