Beth Camp Historical Fiction

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Winter thoughts and ROW80 . . .


January brings
freezing fog this morning,
ice on the street slick and glassy.
Little nameless winter birds cluster
at the bird feeder,
as if the seeds will keep them warm.
Even the trees turn white
and still, each leafless branch,
each pine needle, frost-coated.
Like house plants, we are still alive,
My African violets yet bloom in winter.

ROW80 CHECK-IN: Skipped Sunday's ROW80 check-in. I can only blame volunteer work, writing PR stuff to deadline, and a truly wonderful baby-naming. So, the WRITING (or I should say revising) goes reasonably well "between" other commitments. I can't keep a word count, and I get sidetracked by research, everything from what does a possum really look like to who was the District Constable in 1842.

I'm currently READING Jennifer Chiaverini's Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker, a well researched slice-of-life story in Civil War Washington, D.C., but a very different, more matter of fact style than the evocative writing in Kate Grenville's The Secret River. MARKETING should heat up in the next few weeks as my KDP contract runs out on Feb 7. The next challenge is to take The Mermaid Quilt live on Smashwords. I did learn much from participating in just the first week of The Ultimate Blog Challenge. But writing a blog post a day is simply too much, unless I want to cut back on my main writing project (and I don't).

Question of the Day: I do keep a travel blog, On the Road Again, where I've been posting pictures and some writing about what we saw in our 3 week trip to Africa this last November. But even if I don't post as often as here, more readers are jumping to that blog than this one, and some of those readers are complaining that I need to post more on the travel blog!

Market gurus say to find your niche and promote from there. But my writing is my main focus. I also find it hard to write on the travel blog when we're at home. That nasty inner voice says, "What's so interesting about home?" Today's poem came from what I see out my window at 6 am. Tonight's low will be under 20 degrees Fahrenheit; I'm expecting more frost-covered trees, more revision, and maybe another poem.

So the question is: What would make my writing blog more interesting to you? And thank you for stopping by.


1 comment:

  1. I'd like to hear your views on what's going on around you. Our surroundings might be frozen, but around the world, things continue to happen and the news feed brings them to our attention.

    ReplyDelete