A Tour of My Bookshelf

I’m experimenting with short book videos on my Facebook page.

The first installment is a tour of my bookshelf!

I’m posting them straight to my M. G. Herron Facebook page, but I’ve embedded the first video below for you to check out here.

Next, I’m going to do some short book reviews, starting with The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a wonderful short book and I know a bunch of interesting stuff about it, so it’s an easy one for me to do.

Like my page on Facebook if you want to see more videos like this. Doing videos is very much outside of my comfort zone, but I had fun with this one and decided to do more. It helps that they’re short, so they don’t take a lot of time to put together. Just need enough courage to smile into the camera lens and something to talk about.

Are there any books you’d like to see me review? Leave a comment on the blog and let me know if you do!

Writing updates

Here’s what’s new in my fiction.

I’m polishing those 5 short stories I wrote in the workshop. One has been submitted to a magazine. Another is awaiting some more feedback from beta readers. The other three need a little more work before I’m ready to mail them out.

Now that I have the titles more or less fixed, I’m going to list them here in the order I finished writing them:

1. “Centurion”
2. “Earworm”
3. “The City of Many Worlds”
4. “The Alien Apocalypse is Better with Friends”
5. “Wendigo”

With any luck, I’ll be able to sell a few of these. I haven’t decided how long I’m going to keep them in the mail. Some of the more stubborn writers would keep them in the mail forever, until they sold. I don’t know if I have that kind of patience, but I want to give it at least six months to a year. These things take time, but the payoff is worth it for me. Selling a fiction story to a pro market has been a personal goal of mine for a long time.

In other book news, I also got all of the edits for Tales of the Republic back, and had a great call with my editor last Thursday. I’m currently doing a full read through of the manuscript and making detailed notes before I start the revisions.

To summarize the editorial feedback, the plot of the book is solid, but there is some work to be done on character depth, emotion, pacing, and some of the mystery that I unintentionally left off the page.

C’est la vie. I feel like this is pretty standard feedback for a first draft of mine, short or long. I’m glad that all the work I put into the plot paid off—not having to rewrite a significant portion of the manuscript is a relief (I rewrote huge chunks of The Auriga Project because of plot problems).

So I think I’m getting better at this writing novels thing. But I still have a lot to learn. Of course!

I expect the revisions will take me another month or two, so Tales probably won’t be ready until near the end of the year.

That’s okay. My first priority is always to write the best book I can.

It’s worth the extra effort to make readers happy, and to know in my bones that I wrote the best book I could at the time.

I plan to be writing for a long time, so patience at this stage is crucial. I’ve been on this journey for almost three years now and this is still just the beginning.