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A little writing update. No big. Just ZOMG I’M SO PUMPED

Ron Delaney Jr6 Comments

Everyone! Come here! Listen!

If you follow me on the Twitter you already know THIS, but if not, it’s my outstanding pleasure to announce I’ve joined the Corvisiero Literary Agency family, represented by awesome agent Kaitlyn Johnson. I’m thrilled to work with Kaitlyn on my middle grade ghost hunter novel.

Patrick Swayze Ghost GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

NO! Not that kind of ghost story. I said Middle Grade. What’s wrong with you?
 

Snow Winter GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Dude, too soon.
 

Hmm. That’s not too far off. I’ll take it.
 

😉

I’ll write a longer post on how Kaitlyn and I came to join forces some time over the next week-ish.

GAH! SO excited!
 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Writing Update: May, 2019

Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

For whatever reason, I’ve always done my writing updates over on a dedicated page. Now that that page has gotten kinda long, it’s acting a little wiggy (and by wiggy I mean LOVES to crash while I’m editing it), so I’m going to do what I probably should have done from the jump and post updates as, you know, posts. Here we go!

WIP

I’m pleased as punch that my latest book, SILVER, is out to critique partners. It’s funny, quirky, a little sad in spots, a little angry in other spots, and hella different from what I’ve written before. I love it and can’t wait to hear what my readers think about it. I’d file it as literary Sci-Fi, if you’re curious.

WDC 2019

I’ve booked my trip to NYC (I live in Jersey so I’m using ‘booked’ loosely here) for Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in August. Looking forward to getting my learning on, catching up with friends from around the world, and seeing NK Jemisin give the opening keynote. I might even dip my toes back into the pitch slam this year. MIGHT.

Writer Friends Doing Writer Things

Lastly, some wonderful writers I know have recently put out books you should check out:

Equinox – Tabitha Lord
Renegade – Natasha Raulerson

That’s it for now. Hopefully I’ll have more to post soon 😀

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

Friday Morning FYI – 3/8/2019

Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI – my chance to share observations/rants in short, easy-to-consume form.

“How do you come up with your ideas and stories?” is a question writers get all the time. There’s no checklist of ways, but this screenshot kind of sums it up:

Loneliness defined

My girlfriend is a scientist. In a wonderful speakeasy in Montreal this past weekend, halfway through mixed drink #2, I somehow set her off to talking about free radicals (seriously, I have no idea how that happened). After she said “Combustion is never complete”, a siren went off in my head, so I whipped out my phone to take notes. At “Free radicals are desperate to increase stability” I knew I had something, but not about chemistry or biology. See the title of my note?

And that happens to me all the time. I’m that writer who will die with fifty story ideas unwritten. But where does that come from? That’s this week’s FYI:

Storytellers are programmed to discover inspiration, and can find stories and twists in anything. It’s not witchcraft, and, to be honest, is exhausting, but every now and then the mundane world sparks something cool in our heads, like lonely free radicals looking for love. Where it goes from there is up in the air. It might end up being an analogy a character uses, the central theme of a novel, or just something fun to share with writer friends. What’s important is having an inspiration-seeking mindset.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}

PS – If any of those bullets are inaccurate, don’t @ me, science people. It was a dark bar and my gf was talking fast. If an idea begs to be used, that’s what research is for 😀

 

Friday Morning FYI – 3/1/2019

Ron Delaney JrLeave a comment

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI (I’m-in-Montreal-right-now-so-bonjour!-and-the-stupid-auto-publish-didn’t-work edition) – my chance to share observations/rants in short, easy-to-consume form.

I recently met a new writer who has put down a lot of words in a fairly short time. Those words aren’t all part of a single story, but could be arranged into an interesting narrative soaked through with cool, thought-provoking themes. More writing is needed to stitch everything together, which they were excited about and committed to doing. That made me think about what morphed into this week’s FYI:

I’m working on the final  three chapters of my latest novel. The key word there is ‘working’. There’s tons of fun sayings about writing, including ‘writing is rewriting’, ‘writing is stealing’, etc. In the end, it’s really just work. Regardless of what you’re writing you have to put fingertips to keys as much as you can (and can stand) or all you have is an idea. We’ve all got ideas, but we all don’t have finished first drafts. Get that draft done or, if it doesn’t excite you, move on to the next idea. Life’s too short to stare at something you have no desire to work on.

 

Thanks for reading.

{RDj}

Friday Morning FYI – 2/22/2019

Ron Delaney Jr2 Comments

Welcome to your Friday Morning FYI (something-like-a-year-since-the-last-one-of-these edition) – my chance to share observations/rants in short, easy-to-consume form.

I recently had a short story published (*shameless self back pat* – won 1st place) in a new annual anthology competition called The Bould Awards. It’s a small thing in the grand scheme and came after years of submissions, but it let me create an Amazon author page, which is kind of cool.

That got me thinking about all the paths to publishing available to writers today. It used to be that you’d type out your work (good god, how did people write anything without BACKSPACE, Cut > Paste, etc.?), somehow get the name of a publishing agent, stick your work in a yellow envelope, hand it to a smiling neighborhood postman, and pray. Now we’ve got blogs and online profiles, email, content-formatting submission forms, Twitter contests, live-pitching at conferences, small press open calls, Wattpad, hybrid publishing, a hundred forms of self-publishing, etc. This is good and bad, of course. With availability comes opportunity, but also mountains of content for decision makers to weed through and for your work to be compared against. Still, what a world!

That brings us to this week’s FYI:

The only thing worse for your art than comparing your work/struggles/achievements to someone else’s is assuming there’s only one path to whatever you define as success. Everyone’s golden ring is different. If you have one book in you, there’s options. If you have ten books in you or a bunch of short stories or fifty pieces of flash fiction or a poetry collection, same answer. Don’t get hung up on someone else getting picked over you for a contest, writer friends around you landing agents or selling short stories, or whatever. Focus on you and your art, craft it as best you can, and learn from every new sentence/paragraph/page/chapter/story. In the end the most important thing is to persist along your path, not trace anyone else’s.

 

Thanks for reading,

{RDj}