Goals to Start the New Year: 2016 Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour

Goals are interesting things with a mutable nature. When I first set out goals for myself each year, it was easy. Whether I made them or not, I had something to strive for and I could always tweak them as needed.

All that changed when I gained readers.

Trust me, I'm not complaining one bit. I love having readers. Knowing someone is waiting for the next in each series is better motivation than a random, mutable goal.

However, it also means my goals have more weight, and I have to think about them a lot more. I can't just toss some ideas into the air and run with it. My goals have to line up with the expectations of my readers and my long-term plans as an indie author.

Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

The End Is Nigh…The Year End Assessment That Is: 2015 Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour

This time of year is both something I dread and cherish.

The cherish is easy. I get to see my extended family including my son who has grown up and moved to another state, and of course, there will be pies ;).

The dread is also pretty easy.

I start the year with grand plans, strategies that attempt to survive first contact with the enemy, in this case Father Time. At the end of the year, I have to evaluate the success of those strategies, identify where and when strategy devolved into tactics and further into a desperate scramble. Sure, some might have survived the year, but any that didn’t require reassessment before I set out my 2016 plan.

Some things that went wonderfully…and others were mixed.

Publishing

I released a new book in all three of my series:

Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

A Few of My Favorite Things from 2015

When I read this topic, what immediately came to mind was the song from Sound of Music, hence my title.

Choosing favorites is one of the worst jobs in the world because you’re not really choosing favorites if you’re doing it right. Everything I enjoyed this year is a favorite or I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, and as in the song, there are so many favorites small or large that no single post could cover them.

A lot of my favorite things are nature-oriented such as delighting in the strength of the trees in my neighborhood (it was newish when we moved in 10 years ago, so the trees took a bit to grow), especially now with them displaying their fall colors. I love the way there is snow on the mountains in all four directions as much as it hints at a hard winter because we need the water and there’s something magical about the crisp snow air.

Those above are the easy ones. With things like books, movies, etc., it depends on my mood. Here are some of the ones that come to mind today, though a different group might float to the top tomorrow:

Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

Authors Who Have Influenced My Writing

This month’s Merry-Go-Round topic is a hard one for me, though perhaps not for the reasons you suspect. The topic is “If you could be another writer, who would you want to be? Or what have you learned from them?” While I do not want to become another writer, I have certainly learned from many. This answer will have some crossover in my favorite reads because that’s whom I learn from as well, but the focus will be different.

My earliest influence as a writer has to be Andrew Lang, who compiled a series of fairytale books. From those, I learned the patterns, tropes, that underlie many genres, and I learned my first rebellions. My early stories were all fairytales, but while some followed the tropes, others broke them by empowering the female characters, undermining the concept of clear good and evil, and making other changes to reflect my complex reality. I think of one in particular where the beast terrifying the land is the ensorcelled twin brother of a simple peasant…and my “princess” is another peasant who goes to the king to demand assistance, and ends up accepting both brothers into her life.

Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

My Favorite Genres for Writing and Reading

This is a hard topic for me because I’ve hardly met a genre in which I haven’t found at least one book to enjoy, and odd stories have popped up from all sorts of genres I never imagined writing.

If you want my oldest favorite, that would have to be science fiction. I had a troubled time with reading in school during my early years. I could not find anything valuable in the books I was offered (Dick and Jane) and so decided the whole thing wasn’t worth my time. Then my sister stepped in with Anne McCaffrey and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

At the time, both Pern and Darkover were filed under science fiction (don’t ask me what I think of the shift), as both are anthropological science fiction. I adored the cultures and the interactions between people of different traditions. As a diplomat’s kid, it was as though they were writing for me.
Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

Lessons Learned from Other Storytelling Genres: 2015 Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour

The topic for this month is lessons learned from other storytelling genres. This is a strong one for me because I didn't come to storytelling through writing. I came to it from an oral tradition that I later tried to translate into written form. I never did finish that project, but have since moved on to new ones.

I feel I've already given a strong example in a post I made all the way back in 2012 (which you can read about here) where I compared two television shows that on the surface are completely different and yet share at least two character arcs (one I discuss and the other mentioned in the comments). The two shows are Chuck and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

Margaret McGaffey Fisk - Mid-Year Check-In 2015

It can be easy when looking forward to see everything you have still to do and despair. It's one of the reasons I do monthly goals on Forward Motion. The goals matter less than the review at the end of the month which gives me a glimmer of just how much I've accomplished...whether directly related to those goals or not.

So, here we are halfway through the year. I know I have a lot more to do before the annual clock ticks over, but what have I accomplished?

On the writing front:

1. I wrote the How Beer Saved the World, Book 2 story in January.
2. I finished writing Uncommon Lords and Ladies, Book 3 in January (started in November).
3. I wrote The Steamship Chronicles, Book 4 from March to June.
4. I am now writing Apprentice (Seeds Among the Stars, Book 3).

Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

What’s on My TBR Pile? 2015 Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour

This month’s topic depends on which to-be-read pile you’re talking about. Since it doesn’t specify, I’ll look at the top four books of each in turn.

I’m a reviewer for NetGalley as some of you might remember me mentioning. This means I end up with a good stack of books I’ve asked for but haven’t finished. And more get offered all the time–interesting ones that are hard to turn down.

The top four on the NetGalley list right now are:
Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution by Peter Ackroyd
In The Air Tonight by Lori Handeland (Paranormal Romance)
Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

Margaret McGaffey Fisk - In Memoriam - Desmond O'Grady, Poet and Friend

There are people in your life that are pivotal to how you perceive the world, even if you don't know their full story, even if it was a fragment of your existence.

Desmond O'Grady was one of those people for me. I met him when I was about six years old. I had no idea how old he was beyond "adult" and didn't learn until last year when he died that he was an internationally known poet. I knew he had some measure of fame from how my family visited him in Boston when he was doing a reading, but I saw my Desmond with little understanding of the bigger picture.

So while his bios and tributes talk about what schools he taught at, the places he'd been and who he met, I'm going to talk about the adult who didn't care about age, who wasn't perfect, had some bizarre quirks, and created strong communities of fascinating people.
Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

Margaret McGaffey Fisk on Online Reading Communities

I keep hearing how no one is reading, how there are no more readers anymore. I’m a little confused by this considering I am surrounded by readers in both my physical and online life.

The question with this month’s topic is not so much what to talk about but rather how to narrow it down. Since the topic refers to communities, I’ve decided to talk about two I participate in at least to the extent of posting my book reviews and tracking my own reading, though I’ve done more on and off in both. These are GoodReads and LibraryThing.

I had a grand plan of interviewing my sister who is a much more avid user of LibraryThing, actively participating in discussions and the like, but life happened so you’ll have to survive on my own impressions. Maybe she’ll write something in the comments (hint, hint).

Based on my experience, the main features in both online communities are the ability to track what you’re reading, a forum built around talking about what you read, and the giveaway programs.
Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

Margaret McGaffey Fisk on Hobbies and Crafts Aiding Writing

The topic this month is an interesting one for me because I’m a bit of a generalist as are many writers. I list among my crafts and hobbies everything from quilting to drawing to playing the guitar to doing puzzle books. Reading I don’t really consider a hobby, but then it’s life critical.

The thing about creative outlets is they draw from the same creative pool. There’s the risk of taking energy away from something I’m writing by indulging in one of my hobbies, but at the same time, they can have a renewing influence when I’m tapped or stuck.

The risk, or maybe the reality, of how much creative energy my writing demands is the reason my creative hobbies often fall by the wayside. My life is littered with guitar songs I planned to learn, quilts I’m in the middle of sewing, drawings abandoned because it takes too long to get them right, and more other projects than I can think of offhand, which doesn’t even begin to touch the things I’ve wanted to do but never started.

From the above, you might think my hobbies have an antagonistic relationship with my writing, but that really isn’t true. Beyond the renewal, playing the guitar can set my mind spinning through different answers to plot points I’m struggling with. My drawing might be restricted to marginalia at this point, but those same skills have helped me produce covers that have drawn many positive comments. Without that ability, I would have had many fewer titles released because of startup costs.

However, I want to talk about the least likely and ultimately one of the most helpful hobbies I’ve found: quilting.

Read more on Tales to Tide You Over

Dream Writing Retreat: 2015 Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour

When I was in college, I had this image of my life afterwards as a permanent writing retreat. I would live in a cabin in the woods, only come out for supplies, and write all the time.

Well, life happened.

I met my husband before I graduated, we had two kids shortly after, and writing became a hobby I slipped into the cracks between working full time, caring for the boys, and enjoying myself.

What I realize now, though, is just how quickly I would have grown stagnant, become a hermit with nothing new to say, had I made that dream happen.

I have written on a Palm Pilot with an IR keyboard while at noisy kids places like Chuck E. Cheese, Great America, and my favorite though now defunct, The Discovery Zone. I have written while sitting in my car outside of my son’s first college (a high school/college hybrid) on my phone. I have written while standing in line at the DMV, using the notes function on my Kindle... Read more on Tales to Tide You Over.

New Beginnings: 2015 Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour

The topic for January is somewhat ironically New Beginnings. I promise I did not know that when I decided to join the tour. This is something I've thought about since it started some two years ago, and this seems the right year to jump in with both feet.

My life has been full of new beginnings recently in pretty much every aspect.

On the professional side, starting in October of 2013, I decided to take the leap of faith and put out my novels for the public's reading pleasure. You won't see my name on the television any time soon, but I've entertained and inspired some readers, which is a heck of a lot more than my stories were doing as they took up space on my hard drive.

Like any new beginning, this endeavor provoked both joy and terror. I've fumbled about a little, made some mistakes, and gloried in the ability to correct those errors rather than living with them.

Read more on Tales to Tide You Over.