So, hey, Blessed Ostara, Happy Spring, and welcome to the Mystic Match Mysteries blog! I'm not
Demeter, I'm Marta Ferguson, her creator and by extension, publicist. Ultimately the
blog is here as content marketing to lure you all into buying the Mystic Match
Mysteries, starring Demeter West & Co. They are on the way. Pre-order link
coming soon.
But I hope the blog itself will be fun as well. I plan to
have entries on tarot work, on haunted and/or historic places, on writing, and on
whatever else wanders in. Certainly the associated Twitter feed (@wordhoundwriter)
will be intensively focused on writing: favorite lines, bits of writing advice
from me and others, words of random kindness, outrageous beauty, and so on.
The image that heads this particular column is the word
cloud I generated from the book's prologue. I'll be featuring the word clouds
chapter by chapter as I move into more active book promotion.
Meanwhile, as this is the blog's inaugural post, let me
comment on the writing-a-first-novel ride. I've started about half dozen novels
over the last couple decades. Let's call this Take #7, the lucky one. Though I
had worked on it in fits and starts prior to 2015, I've worked on it longer
fits and starts since then. In terms of actual contact time, I have over 150
writing and editing hours and over 200 research hours invested. What does that
mean?
The first 150 hours are pretty self-explanatory: I
typed stuff, I squinted and retyped stuff. I got comments from my fantastic and
fantastically astute beta readers, read their comments, squinted and retyped
more stuff. The research hours might be a little less intuitive: I looked stuff
up. Lots of time in Scientific American-type
articles on M-theory and the multiverse. Lots of time playing with all my tarot
cards and books. Time spent, too, training with masters of fiction craft. My
background's in poetry, so I had to learn the moves for the new game. My
favorite guides? Stephen King's On
Writing and Sandra Scofield's The
Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer. I'll talk more about those and
other books another time. TTFN!
