January 2016

Volume 1

Welcome to this inaugural edition of The Blur!

I'll confess to not knowing exactly what I'm going to do with this yet or what the "final version" will look like, but I realized last year that I needed to start getting in the habit of doing this, even on an irregular basis. I'm not expecting to do more than about 4 this first year. We'll see. I reserve the right to send occasional book announcements too.

Back in October 2015, I wrote about figuring out my Voice, so I could blog about the stuff that's important to me, rather than just talking about writing and my book all the time. Because let's face it: there are about 1.12 gazillion writers out there talking about writing and their book all the time. We don't really need one more. So I do know that this will break down into about three sections, about Writing, Voice, and "Elsewhere," or things I want to share that don't fit one of the other categories.

So Welcome.

Writing

The Sad Girl re-released January 11, to coincide with National Human Trafficking Awareness Day. As part of the event, C Streetlights and I set up a giving campaign to raise funds for Operation Underground Railroad, a trafficking rescue operation. C and I had already decided to donate half our sales to the drive. Two other authors pledged their January sales during the Facebook event, and I let about half a dozen people take over my Facebook Page during the evening. We raised $185 that night, in addition to the sales that we'll total up later. Good times.
I was featured in the January edition of the Tulsa NightWriters Nightscapes newsletter (PDF download).
I've got two projects going right now. The novel, working title In Plain Sight is the third book in The Sad Girl universe. I'm about 8,400 words into it right now. It takes place a little over a year after the end of The Sad Girl, and will be a little darker than the first two books. I'm trying a different viewpoint as well, so we'll still hear from Danny, but we'll hear from other people as well. The second project is a series of short stories about various periods that got passed over in the novels. I'm planning four of them, and I'm not yet sure how I'm going to release them. I've still got my Wattpad account, and even then, I might release them as a companion book.
I've set a new goal (that wasn't included in my Writing Goals post in December) as well. I want to enter at least two contests more than I did last year, which will be easy, since I only entered one. There's a neat flash fiction contest with a grand prize of three weeks in Key West, with regular access to Hemingway's villa where he wrote six or seven books. That'd be a pretty cool visit. Have to write the piece first though.

Voice

As mentioned above, January is National Human Trafficking Awareness Month, and C Streetlights and I are donating half our sales for the month to Operation Underground Railroad. If you've already bought the book and want to help more, you can donate through our fundraising campaign.
There are tons of charities working in the fight to end human trafficking. If you're unsure about who to donate to, check an organization out via Charity Navigator or Charity Watch.
In conjunction with their coverage of the Holtzclaw trial in Oklahoma City, the AP did a series on sexual misconduct by police officers. I've got links to all of the articles. It's pretty disgusting, especially when you find out that some states don't even certify their police officers to begin with.

Elsewhere

I've started back to school at Tulsa Community College for the second semester in their Journalism/Mass Comm program. My original goal was to find a PR position in a public safety agency, preferably running their social media platforms. Now, maybe not so much. During my epiphany in a Mass Comm class, I realized I still want to dig deeper into stories. For every wrongful conviction, there's a cold case. How are agencies investigating those? At best, those cases are five years older or more. But the bad guy is still out there. The Innocence Project suggests that more than 130 violent offenses could have been prevented by convicting the right person the first time.
A friend of mine who's a teacher in Ohio got me thinking about maybe trying to do some classroom appearances, with his class via Skype, or maybe some local schools. For a shy introvert, that's a rather scary proposition. But I wonder if I don't owe it to younger writers, to give them some encouragement. I wonder how much sooner I might have started writing with more encouragement.

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