As anyone who might be following this Word Slinger Project might have taken note I have had to take a short break while I suffered a never ending bout of the flu. The bug pretty well took my hiney down. Luckily, both Elizabeth and follow Slinger, Khalid Muhammad stuck with me while their reviews, interviews and profiles literally hung in virtual cyberspace. Thanks oodles Elizabeth for being a complete trooper through my weakened state… I was just becoming a lycan. =)
As a little girl I never had any other dreams other than to one day be an author. Reading was something I began doing fairly young and I wrote little stories that popped up here and there in grade school. There was a small story about a duck that I my mom kept from a Spring Story Collection in third grade that might have been inspired but sadly lacked coherence. Let’s say I won’t be publishing it anywhere.
I came up with the Weekly Indie Word Slinger Project after doing a good deal of research for publishing my own novels. The amount of work involved sounded daunting, but when I looked at the forum discussions of people who had literary agents shopping the big six and those who were dealing with marketing people it left a terrible taste in my mouth. It didn’t sit well with me that someone could tell me to change my story to make it more palatable. It might make me sound narcissistic or inflexible but I write my stories the way I want them read. I don’t want someone telling me to change them to suit them. Not to mention that I don’t necessarily write with the intention to rake in the bottlecaps, I do it because I love it. I dream in full plots and I wake up writing down characters names and snippets of dialogue and settings. I feel passionate about it. It’s what I love. I don’t want someone telling me how they want me to write.