I’ve spent a lot of time skipping through Twitter posts about how to build an author platform and generate a loyal base of readers. I do have a Goodreads account but it isn’t one of my regular ‘sites that I check every day. I have a range of them – Twitter, Facebook, a couple of forums and email and that seems to be my limit. I try to add others in but they don’t seem to stick. Likewise, when time is pushed I don’t tend to update my blog, FB page or tweet that often either.
The good news is that there is a reason for my cyber-silence – I’m actually writing fiction instead! Through a contact I’ve got an opportunity to place a short story. Somewhere it’ll be read and hopefully I’ll be paid. To be honest I thought about this long and hard as I don’t feel able at the moment to work on two bits of pieces of fiction at the same time, so I’ve put my novel to one side for the moment. I don’t feel too bad about this as I reached a natural break point in one, and the short story is up against a deadline so I know it can’t take up too much time. In fact, I’m 12,000 words in already and I’ve only been at it about a month. Realistically it won’t take too much time out and hopefully I can take lessons learned from this and apply them to my novel.
So, hopefully as we move into 2012 I should see some fiction published and also I hope to have The Fifth Warrior at least finished and with a following wind edited by the end of the year. I seem to have resisted the tendency of the festive season to remove you from real life and carried on writing regardless. I even added 500 words on last night!