ShaynaGrissomAuthor

Yay! I'm so relieved. I've spent far too long dreading and fussing over it. Now that the book is out, newsletters come out the 22nd, ads are rolling...it's done. I really worked myself into a fit about it. The Novella Series is the first I've ever had sole control over as a writer. In my mind, self-publishing is a different sort of writing career. It requires a sense of business and accountability that a traditionally published author doesn't deal with. Not to say that traditional publishing doesn't come with its own oceans to navigate, but they are two totally separate paths in the same industry. I didn't think I had the capacity to do what so many indie authors do. I read, youtubed, podcast, and researched for the better part of the last six months and still found myself scrambling. So, in this series, the novellas are about love. Romance, love for children, love for a town, wanting love, and having it be something different than we expect.

Last night I attended the Black Lives Matter protest in my home town. It was hosted by five women who managed to arrange everything in about two days. Their Facebook Page can be found here . I arrived an hour early to assess the situation beforehand. Given how many of these protests erupt in violence, I was concerned for my own safety. Before I left, I had to explain to my 7-year-old daughter where I was going and she cried, begging me not to go. I promised her everything would be fine, I wanted to keep my promise. Auburn's streets are old and narrow, townhall is sandwiched between new construction and old, with awkward roads that confuse even the locals. As a SWAT Tank drove by protestors while staring us down, I decided I couldn't leave even if things did go wrong. I saw the cops surround the area and thought, I'm sorry, Lily. The new apartments give heights to the radically changing downtown. The Sound Transit train station has been a game-changer for what was onc

The Novella Series is something I've been working diligently on for the summer. Currently, there are four for this series that are lined up. I will eventually make them into a box set in the future. People always ask me "What are you writing now?" and it's a struggle to answer because I am doing multiple things at once. It's a chain process where one links to another and I work in tandem with other people's schedules as well as my own deadlines. So what does that look like exactly? This is my process: Concept development for Story #1 I have a rough concept on hand that has been sitting in my think tank. I get these from dreams, from random thoughts, inspiration has yet to be a bottleneck for me. My reservoir grows faster than I can currently write. I turn this into an outline using The Hero's Journey along with a character plot arc. This is my current favorite for the novellas. So, once the outline is complete, I move on to Draft Sto