A literary agent, the guest speaker at my local Sisters in Crime meeting in September 2007, encouraged me to blog. She suggested it as a way to begin to gain audience for my writing, while I completed my book. Now it’s done, and as I work on getting it published, I discovered in the last year and a half something quite amazing for someone who had to look up what “blog” meant when she first got started. I was born to blog.
My blog has the same name as my forthcoming book, a boomer memoir called Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights. I always wanted to write a weekly column (daily was too rigorous), and I had a many entries already written, itching to share the wisdom I’ve learned along the way in a feature I’d call Life in the Vast Lane. I knew this would be a hard sell in the print medium that’s more down- than upsizing these days. I was turned down once or twice, but before I picked up that thread, soon I realized that most of the Vast Lane material fits my blog to a “T.” I had some mechanics to figure out on how to blog, but as far as material was concerned, I’d already been blogging for years without knowing it. Now I had somewhere to publish it.
The hidden gold in this process are the friends I’ve made and how much blogging has fine-tuned my writing. I can’t think of when my work has evolved more in such a relatively short period of time. This alone is worth the effort to blog! I get to test drive concepts for future books, get audience reactions in the Comments, and I feel I am getting a pulse on the target audience for my memoir series—baby boomer women.
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Joyce L. Mason
Sacramento Area, CA – USA
www.joycemason.com
Author of the upcoming memoir, Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights
Visit my blog: www.hotflashbackscoolinsights.blogspot.com