Writing and General Update

Hello, one and all. Sorry I have been remiss in posting here recently, I've been super focused on writing and getting one of my novels ready for submission.

The Writing

I've mentioned before that I'm writing a novel series based off of my novella Mina's Children: The Legacy of Dracula and I've been focusing on that a lot. It's going well and the second books is shaping up nicely, while plans to extend Mina's Children into a novel are afoot too.

It's weird, but having a notepad for this one has been the key. I make no excuses for my brain, it's just the way it is!

The Submitting

Last year I finished writing a novel called Ellie Grange and the Mythical Space Diamond and I knew I wanted to try and land an agent with it. However, I've been letting it sit, because I also knew I wanted to change the ending a little. It just wasn't quite right.

Turns out, with some distance, it only needed a little tweaking to fix what felt wrong, so yay!

An agent just requested the manuscript after reading my query letter, so I really, really hope they like the book. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Wattpad

As I've mentioned before, I'm an ambassador over at Wattpad - which means I'm a volunteer who helps out with some stuff, and it's a great place to hang out. Link to Ambassdors profile on Wattpad.

Me on Wattpad - NatashaDuncanDrake

I've been posting original fic and fanfic over there for a while and I've decided to do a big push with some of my old fanfics, to share them with a new audience. Those of us who came from Livejournal know AO3 is THE place for fanfic, but there are many, many people on Wattpad who have never heard of it.😮 My plan is to entice people in with fanfic and then hopefully hook them with my original work too 😎.

Wattpad is a little pickier about what content is and is not allowed than AO3 - for example, no PWPs 😭, a story has to have plot as well as sex or it's not allowed, but there is still a thriving fanfic community over there.

I'm stacking up a whole heap of fanfic to post and having a lot of fun doing it (not that I'm not posting original work too). It gives me a chance to:

1. re-edit some of my older work - I'm looking at you wayward commas, or commas lost in action, or OMG how many "and then"s are there in this fic?! 😂
2. create covers for them - which is fun

There are some that can't go over because they aren't suitable, but I can rarely ever write a story with out it growing a plot, so most of them are good.

I did discover I have one Weiss Kreuz story which is basically 17K of porn. It does have plot, but the plot revolves around the sex, so I'm thinking it's probably on dodgy ground. 😂

The Issue of Plagiarism

And before you ask "What about the plagiarism problem" - because I have had so many people ask me that when I mention Wattpad, I have no idea why some people think Wattpad has a reputation for plagiarism and not helping writers.

Yes, people's stories sometimes get copied and re-uploaded by unscrupulous individuals to Wattpad or other sites, but Wattpad has a very clear, easy to follow procedure for having them removed. As I mentioned to someone on Twitter, I have had way more problems with people stealing and uploading my eBooks from other sites like Smashwords and Amazon than anything on Wattpad.

Wattpad has more than 65 million users, so there are bound to be some bad apples, but they (unlike some other sites I could mention) work very hard to make sure they are dealt with.

Canadian Lovelies

Wattpad are Canadian, but they have users from all over the planet. They are also lovely💖 just like their country's reputation and they have a whole section of their site dedicated to helping writers expand their audience and get the most out of the platform. Wattpad loves writers and it wants writers to love them.