Gwenn Wright's Blog

It's been FIVE YEARS since the re-release of Dacie Mae: Midnight Under the Magnolia (which I apparently need to rebrand as Midnight Under the Magnolia, A Dacie Mae Mystery), and I'm happy to announce the upcoming release of book 2!!! Book 2 of the Dacie Mae Mysteries will be released this September! To celebrate I am giving away five paperback copies. Head over to my Instagram and like and comment for a chance to win a copy of Midnight Under the Magnolia!

I'm not exactly on the same page with John Green all the time but he did say one thing that I completely agree with, and I'm paraphrasing here, "You don't have to like my characters."
In the past, back when I dared to read reviews, some complained about Rocky. She's emotionally unstable. She doesn't know what she wants. She's this then she's that. She's annoying.
Yeah.
She's 17.
She's never traveled.
She doesn't hang out with the party crowd.
She's built this false exterior around herself to hide her pain and to protect herself from abuse.
She has serious, legitimate trust issues.
Take her away from her white trash, roaming-eyes pervert of a stepdad and throw her into a world with rich men who have potentially nefarious ulterior motives and yeah...that could make her a little bipolar in her actions. Mix together the danger, intensity,  and lies with some seriously emotionally damaged heartthrobs and the girl has some issues to work out while she's in the thick of it.
I believe in growth, that wisdom and strength come from passing through the fires and being refined. What teenage girl doesn't think she's all that but doesn't fall apart when cast out into the storm? We stumble and fall along the way before we learn to walk against the wind. We do stupid things and that is how we gain wisdom and humility.
Is Rocky a pain?
Absolutely.
But she and William and Peter are on a journey to become the people the family has needed all along.

Forget anything else I ever said before about anyone other than Ian Harding playing William Drexler the 3rd. 
Yes. I'm 35. 
Yes. I watch Pretty Little Liars. 
The first time I watched it (after reading the first two books), I was absolutely stunned to see William Drexler the Third himself walk onto screen. The look of him, the way he moves....it was eerie. I found myself watching scenes over and over again just to see "William" move around. 
So forget all my other suggestions. 
Only Ian Harding will do. 
No idea what I'm talking about? The von Strassenberg Saga is available for Nook, Kindle and in paperback. BUY The Bundle FOR KINDLE BUY the bundle FOR NOOK 
FILTER for KINDLE $0.99
And I am slowly working on the adaptation for a screenplay contest!

It's been awhile. 
My brain pretty much went into hibernation throughout the first four and a half months of my pregnancy. Suffering from constant nausea and narcolepsy is hard on the creative process. We're almost at five months now and my energy has returned, to some extent at least, and I can sit at my desk for more than twenty minutes before the need for sleep overwhelms me. Thanks to this burst in energy I was finally able to finish Dacie Mae: Midnight Under the Magnolia (it went live today!) and get started on The Devil's Children: The von Strassenberg Saga, book 4. It's my goal to have book 4 done before my May 13 due date. 
I blame this guy. Boy #4
After that, we'll see if I will get any work done during the first month. My husband will be away for that first whole month. Can't be helped. I've done it before, having been a newly single mom when my third son was born, but I've never tried to write a book and chauffeur three older boys while raising a baby on my own. And I'm ten years older than I was then. All I can promise is that I will try to keep getting the stories out. We can hope this kid won't be a colicky insomniac like my oldest son. That would be excellent. 
In the meantime, enjoy Dacie Mae and brush up on your von Strassenberg history because more twists and revelations are coming!

There's a lot of junk on TV today. 
A lot of poorly conceived plots, shallow characters, shoddy dialogue. This is particularly true for television aimed at the YA/NA crowd. 
We won't even get into The Vampire Diaries and Secret Circle. It's painful for me as I have been a fan since the books first came out. Beyond that, most shows aimed at this age group center around the paranormal or superbly conniving, backstabbing elitists. It's okay to watch for awhile but eventually it gets tired. 
Lately I have found myself flipping channels and finding nothing that I really want to sink my teeth into. What is it that I'm looking for? What would engage my brain without enraging it? I find myself wanting to watch something like Dacie Mae. 
Dacie Mae is a strong, stubborn young woman trying to take care of her mama while still working toward her goal of becoming a reporter for a major newspaper. This is not an easy task when you're from Nowhere, Missouri and you have people who depend on you. She's smart and scrappy but still vulnerable, especially when it comes to romance. There is a dark secret that burdens her. And US Deputy Marshal Hank McClain adores her in the most infuriating sort of way, leaving Dacie Mae unsure if he views her as a kid sister or a potential girlfriend. 
This is what I would like to watch. This young girl fighting for her dreams, battling romantic notions that may or may not exist, caring for her mama, scrapping with redneck drug dealers....something real and encouraging but still sexy and thrilling. 
I love working on Dacie Mae and plan for it to be a long series as we watch her struggle her way to the city and realization of her goals. I am behind schedule and apologize for that. My only excuse is an awful first trimester. Not too much longer and the final installment of Dacie Mae: Midnight Under the Magnolia will be available. KINDLE NOOK

I am your typical self-defeating writer.
My career began when I penned my first poem in kindergarten. Maybe I didn't start making money then but that's when it began, when the gnawing need to create and weave stories wormed it's way into my marrow. Writing is what I do and who I am but most of the time I suppose that I do not do it very well.
My Eeyore attitude is only painted in deeper shades of gloom when you consider that no one around me understands what it is to be a writer. I live in a very normal sphere. Housework. Homework. Toilets to scrub. Socks to match (really, why bother?). Dishes to clean. Take the kids to school. Pick them up from school and so on. Normal. White picket fence normal but inside I'm all Johnny Depp in Twisted Window.
Okay. Maybe not THAT crazy but still not white-picket-fence normal, either. But who has time to be the flaky writer when there is so much practical crap that needs tending to? And nobody comprehends how consuming being a writer is?
It's an especially difficult thing to be a writer just starting out and not have flesh and blood people around you who really get it. I'm not one for writers' groups, being anti-social as I am, but the need to be surrounded by and inspired by professionals with war stories and scars is definitely growing.
This video came across my Twitter feed today. It is immensely helpful and comforting, one that I will probably come back to many times. John Truby gets it and articulates quite wonderfully what it is to be a writer. If you need some drive put back into your work watch this.

Responsibility often shows up in the most unlikely places.
It's one thing to be at a book signing and have readers ask you questions about how to be an author (as if I know) and quite another to be at your niece's birthday party or in the parking lot of the grocery store . At the book signing you're on. You have your writer's hat on. But when you're eyeballing birthday cake and hollering at your kids to stop snapping each other with towels, well, it's different. I was in mom mode and I couldn't quite articulate my experience as an indie author.

I try to impress upon anyone who happens (on the very off-chance) to hear that I write books that I am not a traditional author and that I have only sold (for actual cash) somewhere between a thousand and two thousand books. For all the good it's done me, I've given away nearly ten thousand.
The question they (typically being bookworm teenage girls) always ask me is, "How do I become an author?"
It's silly but my mind actually seizes up at this question. But I gave it some thought and jotted it down.

Obviously, you have to write.
And write a lot.
Really you should write something every day.
I am not good at following this advice. Typically I blame the children but there are authors out there who also have children and still manage to get some writing done every day.
In this case, do as I say and not as I do.

Read.
All the time. Read different genres. Read poetry. Read the newspapers.

Accept that you're going to write crap.
Just get it in your head that the first draft will always be a junker. With each story you write you are a beginning potter and you are only just figuring out the shape of it what it is you're creating. The first attempt will be all misshapen and kind of leaning too far one way...by the fourth or fifth time you work that story-clay, you'll know what you're doing.

Allow a trusted friend to read your work.
By trusted I don't mean the friend who will tell you it's great even when it's lumpy and misshapen. I've had the same BFF for 20+ years. She tells me how it is and she does it out of love, for my own good. Typically she is the only person who sees my raw manuscripts. Find someone you trust like this and talk it out. Sometimes these conversations will lead you to places you never knew your story should go.

Live.
Notice things. Smell the seasons. Feel the thirsty grass crunch beneath your feet. Notice the filtered light of the late afternoon sun. Be still and drink it all in, store it away.

And the old adage: write what you know.
Of course this means you're supposed to write from your own experience. But how boring would that be for most of us!? And what a travesty for readers! There would be no time-travel, no spaceships, no vampires. View it this way instead: write from your own emotional experience. Has your heart been broken by someone who has no clue they even held such power? Have you been lost in a mall and unable to find who you were supposed to be with? Has that particularly brutish wannabe-debutante at your school ever gotten nose-to-nose with you? Did you tremble with anger? Have you watched as the life flowed out of someone you loved?
Setting can be made up, easy as pie.
Use the heartache, the loneliness, the anger and panic you have felt to create those emotions in your characters, to impart those bits of your soul into your readers. Writing is often mentally exhausting for me because I often draw up bitter memories to create scenes and I find myself weeping not just for the story but for what I have gone through in my life. ("Why aren't you working on the next von Strassenberg book?!" BECAUSE IT STRESSES ME OUT!....whew, needed to say that)

Before you send off or upload anything, set it aside, write something else, and then go back and edit your first manuscript. This is where a lot of indie authors trip themselves up. We write, write, write, write, and we do a couple edits, we take notes from our friends, do some more edits, and then we upload. I have learned that this is a huge mistake. Set it aside, give yourself some emotional distance from it, and then go back.

I can offer no more advice than that. It was never my intent to be traditionally published. It was only after I figured out what an uphill battle indie publishing is that I finally sent off letters to agents. The one response I got back was, "We like your polish and tenacity but suggest you scrap your series in progress and send us something fresh." Being loyal to my readers, I opted not to scrap my series but plow ahead on my own.

In a nutshell, to be an author:
Be well-read. Be disciplined. Be determined. You only get better if you keep writing.

Typically my writing is extremely plot-driven.
The characters are somewhat secondary to the plot. 
This is a weakness in my writing. 
I'm just writing the story and moving the pieces around in it. 
This is a fault I never really recognized until I got thick into writing the third installment of Dacie Mae: Midnight Under the Magnolia. 
Dacie Mae, a series of mysteries released in installments, follows a young reporter who dreams of making it out of her small town and into big-city journalism one day. Problem is, she is the only family her clinically depressed mother has left and, she wouldn't admit it, she's also attached to her town. 
Dacie looks like this, whoever she isFor the past several days I have had no one else at home with me. It's just that time of year when the boys go on an adventure with their grandparents and my husband goes off somewhere to do his National Guard duty. I took a couple days to wallow in watching whatever I wanted and playing Sims 3 while I watched it. I read a couple books. By the third day I was totally over TV and the muse had been fed by all the reading and I just wanted to write. 
For two days my TV has remained largely ignored, not being turned on until I'm ready to pass out late at night. I wrote 10,000 words the first day and the second day I re-read all of Midnight Under the Magnolia and then wrote 7,500. 
At first, my goal was to just get through 2k, just get through 2k a day, and even that seemed like a huge feat to accomplish. But in the silence of my home the characters grew to life, started saying and doing things I hadn't asked them to say or do. When I go to bed at night, completely worn out, I still can't fall asleep because US Deputy Marshal Hank McClain is lingering in my thoughts or that thing that happened with Dacie Mae and Henry Wallace keeps replaying in my mind.
Hank kinda looks like this....The story is taking on a new dimension that wasn't in my well-laid plans. 
I was going to scrap it all, "You're veering off topic!"
But this isn't just about the murders. It's about Dacie Mae, her struggles and her strings and everything that she comes along with. So if she wants to step out of the plot into a coffee shop to get some work done, I'm going to follow her because I'm invested in her. If Hank wants to show up and be big brotherly or whatever it is he's being, I'm going to let him. 
It's not the first time I've made this claim but this will be the best thing I've written so far. Of course, every writer should say that with every new work she's putting out. But truly, this is my best. (So far.)

For those of you who haven't heard about Dacie Mae, my goal (now that summer vacation is dying), is to release a new part every Friday. Think of it like a television show. 
Right now we're working through Dacie Mae: Midnight Under The Magnolia. All of these installments follow the same string of events and will eventually be bundled into one book. How many installments in one book? It's looking like 4 or 5. Each installment is .99 If the entire "season" of Midnight Under the Magnolia is 5 installments then  the entire book will be $4.95. 

Get DACIE MAE part 1 Now!
Kindle Nook

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It has been almost two days since we returned from weeklong scout camp at S-Bar-F Scout Ranch and I still don't feel fully recovered! It was a wonderful experience but dang I'm tired now. This week my nephew is coming to stay with us. Next week Cub Scout Day Camp begins. As a den leader I am expected to be there every day. It will be hot and muggy but I love seeing the boys. It is my hope that somehow this week and next week I will have enough energy left over to finish Dacie Mae, episode 3. Maybe I'll just have to get up in the wee dark hours and write while everyone else is asleep. I can't stand being interrupted while writing, makes it difficult to slip away into my fictional world. I will keep you posted and hope that you have enjoyed the first two installments.
Most likely there will be five installments before this "season" ends.

At the urging of my wanna-be agent...also known as my bossy BFF...I have joined the Wattpad community. It's all completely new to me. I had, of course, seen it mentioned here and there but she's been doing research and insists that I check it out. Despite my great attempts to convince her to set up and manage the account for me, she refused and so now I am running my own account. 
Because a girl can never have too many social media platforms. 
So here I am -->> http://www.wattpad.com/user/GwennWright
If you're already there please come join me! I'm lonely and don't really know what I'm doing yet! The intro to Flannery Flynn is posted (the new intro) if you want to have a look-see. Guess I'll be working on that and trying to get caught up on Dacie Mae while doing research for The Devil's Children, The von Strassenberg Saga book 4.
I need more coffee just thinking about it.