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Sep 19, 2022: Practice Makes Progress

This started as a Discord post, until I hit the character limit and realized I could probably just make a chapter in this book about it. It also started as a celebration! I'll get to the actual thing I'm celebrating further down, but I wanted to share the backstory first.

In early 2020, I started posting Dreamcatcher, my first new, non-series book since joining Wattpad in 2017. It did far better than I was expecting. It also got a lot of comments. My older series got a fair number (though less and less over the years) but this blew it out of the water. Now, anyone who follows this book knows by now that I am a data nerd. I also read every comment I get, and reply to most of them. I adore them for many reasons, but one I don't talk much about is the feedback they give me—directly or indirectly—about my own writing.

While reading those comments on Dreamcatcher, I noticed something. Some 90% of the compliments I got were about a few specific things: great descriptions, vivid imagery, and immersive worldbuilding. These were the exact same things I got comments on in my older series, which had been posting for three years by that time. I was thrilled. Dreamcatcher was a huge divergence from that series, and I'd been questioning a lot of things about my writing skills when I started posting it. Consistent comments helped me figure out what my strengths were, and gave my imposter syndrome a good old kick in the butt.

Those were just my strengths, though. And, being me, I immediately began to wonder what kinds of skills I was weaker at but might want to learn for the fun and experience of it. This quickly became a game. What would it take to make character voice the first thing readers noticed and commented on in one of my books? What about character dynamics? What about the creepy elements? The funny ones?

And so, in the background, I began to study and practice the things I wanted to improve on. Comments would be my de facto metric of success, but that was just for consistency: feedback from fellow writers, beta readers, critique exchanges, editors, and just random conversations on Wattpad or Discord would also count. But the thing was, I couldn't tell anyone. If I did, their reactions wouldn't be spontaneous anymore. They'd know what I was practicing, and might feel obligated to encourage me.

Every new book of mine is a test subject for something, but only a handful became the guinea pigs for this particular game. First and foremost was Listen to the Water, the first book of my Kels trilogy, which I joke is my "fluff project" because it's dark as hell even though I write it for catharsis, relaxation, and fun. I started its first chapter in late 2019. Early! Earlier even than Dreamcatcher. But LttW didn't really get going until I began to study the Horror genre, and apply it to that book That was spring/summer 2020. We all cope in different ways.

I'd call LttW and its companions a success on the Horror front, but the thing is, they're pantsed. Mostly. A lot of the things I was writing came to me as I was writing them, so I didn't always understand how or why they worked. That trilogy also gets a lot of silent readers, which I kind of love (spooky ghost readers!) and which meant I didn't get a lot of comment feedback. Which was fine. I write far too many books per year anyway. So I tried again.

That second try was Pray for the Stars, which picked up steam in ONC 2021 despite being the least-promoted of my novellas that year. (Fun fact, I often don't promote my test books. To be brutally honest, this is 90% because I'm not as confident in what I'm attempting with them, so I confine them to my backlist and paradoxically reduce their comment counts. Ah, brains). Anyway, I called that another tentative success. Then I wrote Agarwood (formerly titled Vanilla) for Halloween 2021, and laughed myself silly over every incoherent scared noise y'all made in my comments. It's not that it was funny (though it was also funny). It was a resounding, echoing, bouncing-off-the-rafters success on the Horror-practice front. The game worked.