Pay It Forward Blogfest

This post is slightly different than my previous ones. Today’s “blogfest” is a one-day festival interconnecting the blogs of aspiring writers across the Internet, introducing readers to other like-minded bloggers.

I learned about this “blogfest” at a blog called The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment, written by Matthew MacNish from Cumming, Georgia. As Matthew writes in his introduction, he runs his blog “in an attempt to help other novice writers avoid the mistakes I made in the beginning of my road to publication.” That is the reason many new writers turn to the blogs of others: to get advice and encouragement and to learn from the experience others gained as they wrote their way to publication.

The idea of today’s Pay It Forward Blogfest is “to introduce everyone to everyone else” and this is done by listing and linking to three blogs that one enjoys reading, but which may fly under the radar of other bloggers. And so, without further ado, here are three blogs of aspiring writers that I’ve come across in recent weeks.

Nancy S. Thompson = Nancy has written a thriller called The Mistaken and it is her dream to have it published one day. The tagline for her manuscript is “Vengeance tastes sweet the day Skylar Karras pledges his wife's killer to sex traffickers in the Russian Mafia, but when he mistakenly targets the wrong woman, deal or no, he finds himself protecting her from the very enemy he's unleashed.” I have been following Nancy’s blog and reading her interesting posts such as Blogging vs. Writing vs. Life. I hope to see Nancy’s thriller in print soon!

August McLaughlin = August is currently working on revisions of her novel called In Her Shadow, which is the story of Minnesotan psychologist Claire Fiksen, who, near the anniversary of her mother’s unexpected death, “develops bizarre symptoms that threaten her career, her relationships and her life. Claire’s pursuit for healing becomes a desperate search for answers as she’s lured into the mystery of her family’s sordid past. The nearer she draws to the truth, the worse her condition becomes. And Claire’s isn’t the only life at stake. Meanwhile, someone is watching…” August is a journalist/health writer with a certificate in nutrition, so for certain her novel will be truly credible and exciting. I have enjoyed following August’s blog for some time, where she writes on subjects such as Writers’ Deadly Vices.

Stephen King = We all know of the very successful American author who writes contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction, but what about the other Stephen King, the aspiring writer? The other Stephen King introduces himself by saying, “I'm Stephen King. Really, that's my name. No, no, really. And I write, though I'm a rank amateur. I'm probably as good at writing as the Stephen King who lives in Maine and writes for a living would be at running a college.” Stephen is an unpublished author living in Richmond, Virginia whose day job is being the dean of a small private college. I’ve been following The Other Stephen King on Writing blog as he details his experiences querying, attending writers conferences and working out How to Get Published.

I have visited many other interesting and informative blogs of aspiring writers and hopefully in the weeks to come I will be able to post about them as well.