Two of my passions in life are reading and writing. This blog will cover both. Most posts will be about reading and books, but the ones related to writing will be part of the “LunasLuckyWriting” series.
I chose that name for the series because all my social media handles are LunasLuckyMoon, and I like to adapt that into as many formats as possible, so in this case, LunasLuckyWriting. Plus it rolls off the tongue no? My vision for writing-themed blog posts is to give you insight into my writing process and journey. I am by no means a writing expert. I am learning all this for the first time, so I don’t feel qualified to give advice. But I can tell you what it looks like for me when I write and the struggles and joys I experience along the way.
I am a writer. I could get into a whole other blog post about how intimidating and scary that can be to say and the thousand other emotions that swirl around in me when I tell people that. Writing is not my full time job, yet. For right now it is just my passion and something I devote much of my free time to in the evenings and on weekends.
Becoming a full time writer is my ultimate goal. I don’t need to be an international best selling author (though I wouldn’t complain if I was). My only dream is to make enough money writing and selling books that I can live off the income and do what I love full time. However, there are a lot of steps I need to take to get from here to there. I thought for my first LunasLuckyWriting post I’d share what some of my goals for 2018 are related to writing.
Perhaps one of the first things you’ll notice is there actually aren’t a whole lot of goals that involved writing. That’s because I have a semi-finished manuscript already for my first novel, so a lot of my work this year will be agent-seeking and setting up an online author platform that will make me appealing to agents/publishers.
2018 Writing Goals:
- Create a website: Seeing as you’re on my website reading this post, I’ll go ahead and cross this one off my list.
- Send out 3 newsletters throughout the year. I have absolutely no idea what will be in these newsletters yet, but I’ll think of something and it will be awesome.
- Hit 600 Instagram followers: Gosh that looks so small, but I worry that in order to achieve higher numbers like 1,000 or more I’d have to devote more time that I have available. I’m already at 300, so if you’re reading this and not following me on Instagram….@LunasLuckyMoon!!!! (I post funny stories that tend to feature my adorable dog if that entices you)
- Hit 250 Twitter followers: See comment above
- Send manuscript to beta readers and do one more round of revisions based on reader feedback: This goal is already in motion. My manuscript is currently with 4 people and I will hopefully have feedback in a month or so. Also, can I say that I’m terrified of this!!! People actually READING my book! I kind of want to vomit. But it’s also a tad exciting.
- Find a literary agent: This is the big one and the one most directly related to getting my book published. This year I’m really going to hunker down and research literary agents accepting submissions and send a bunch of query letters. I am very unfamiliar with the process so it will be a learning experience. I’m sure there will be at least one or two blog posts on this topic in the future.
- Continue writing: I know there is a lot of non-writing things I need to do, but I also don’t want to forget the reason I’m doing all of them: my love for writing. Since the manuscript of my first novel is pretty much done, I see myself writing short stories or novellas. Or perhaps outlining future books in my series.
As you can see I have A LOT of work to do. But as with most things related to writing and becoming a full-fledged author, I’m excited about all of it. I can wait to start building my online presence and interacting more with all of you and I am very excited to hopefully see my book take a few steps closer to publication.