Hello folks!
I just wanted to let you all know that as well as finding my writing on here I have started posting it to the website Vocal! I got an account last year but it’s only in the last couple of months that I started using it more regularly. I’ve managed to get something up almost every week, mostly they have been short fiction pieces but I’ve also posted a couple of more introspective pieces and some non-fiction.
I am pretty proud of what I have managed on there, I feel like I’ve posted some really good short stories. I’m not great at writing short stories, I find it difficult to condense what I want to say into a few thousand words. I guess my brain thinks that if it is going to go to all the effort of making up a bunch of characters and maybe a world to put them in it had better squeeze out as much content as possible!
There are two stories in particular I am really proud of. They were both originally written for competitions, and though I didn’t have any luck, I still think they’re pretty darn good.
You can also tell that I am a massive Jane Austen and Regency Romance nerd, though, because they are both set in the Regency period! One of them, this one in fact, link, is really sweet and romantic. Meanwhile this one is definitely showing that one of my other favourite romance genres is Paranormal! You can read that here.
I am planning on writing a retrospective about my time on Vocal in the near future, in particular looking at whether I will keep going with their membership program. I got two months for free but that time has nearly run out. I’m still not certain which way I am going to fall on this. On the one hand it is money I could spend doing other things, and I haven’t exactly made a fortune from Vocal. But I do really appreciate the fact that it gives me the chance to submit to a lot of competitions. That might not sound like much, but recently they have been some of the only things I have been writing.
Top tip to all of you out there, don’t burn yourself out, and don’t take a job where they expect you to attend fortnightly meetings that are at 2am because of time zones. Especially if that job will only pay you for by the hour but per word you submit. You end up exhausted and then you don’t write enough and then you feel guilty so you try to write more and then you just get more and more tired.
But yeah, this is all to say that I hope to post more regularly in the near future. I’ve got a lot that I want to say and now that I have more energy you aren’t going to be able to shut me up!
Stay safe out there!
K