#IWSG February 2025: Old Projects

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds! Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the February 5 posting of the IWSG are Joylene Nowell Butler, Louise Barbour, and Tyrean Martinson!

The following link will allow you to peruse everyone in the Blog Hop.

Link | IWSG Blog Hop Participants 

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February 5 question - Is there a story or book you've written you want to/wish you could go back and change?

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Hello, friends!

Well... we made it through January.

I didn't think the month was ever going to end, but here we are.

It was a pretty eventful month for me personally. A little more eventful than I had planned.

We went to ChattaCon in Chattanooga for the Saturday of the event on the 18th. It's about a 2.5 hour drive, so not bad for a day trip. Being that it's in January, we never really know what the weather is going to be like, so I'm hesitant to book a room for the weekend in case it snows or something and we can't get there. It was my first time attending ChattaCon. It was small, but a really great vibe. Some of our good author friends were there. The panels were great. There was a nice vendor hall. And the Saturday night program looked really rad. So I think next year, we might just do a hotel on Saturday night, instead of both Friday and Saturday. Money is always tight right after the holidays.

Here are a few pictures with some of our friends: Darin Kennedy, Bob McGough and Venessa Giunta.

Unfortuantely, I picked up a stomach bug at ChattaCon and spent the whole next week pretty ill. Which super sucked because it was my birthday week!

Despite all that, I did manage to mark off one of my writing goals from last month. I finished my draft of SportsWIP. I wrote 41,109 words between January 1 and January 25 and wrote THE END on this book I had hoped to finish last year. I'd started to feel like I didn't know how to write a new draft after not finishing anything in 2024. Thankfully, once I got in the zone, that wasn't the case.

SportsWIP clocks in at 107k, so I've got some editing to do, but I'm so proud of this book and can't wait to whip it into shape.

After I finished SportsWIP, I had to dive into my holiday romance that is on submission to make a few changes before my agent sends out a second round. Unfortunately, I got two-thirds of the way through my edits and realized I'd been editing the wrong document. cries The two documents were so close that I think it was only missing about four paragraphs, but they were four very important paragraphs, and I had to comb through the two documents, side by side, to merge them to make sure I didn't miss anything else. I have about 35 pages left in my edit, a synopsis to rework, and then it's off to my agent with a lot of crossed fingers and toes.

So yeah, Janaury was pretty eventful!

I did get a rejection today on my short horror story I've been submitting, so that was a bummer. I may never find a home for it, but I'll keep trying.

I am SUPER STOKED to announce that I will be presenting a webinar on February 15th about Surviving the Query Trenches as part of the education mission of The Writers' Troupe group. This is such an amazing group that has weekly opportunities to get together and sprint and weekly networking/craft chats.

I spent a lot of time querying last year, and I can't wait to present things I learned along the way to people who are in or about to be in the query trenches themselves to maybe help make the journey a little bit easier.

Looking back at past projects

Today's question asks: - Is there a story or book you've written you want to/wish you could go back and change?

Actually, this is one of my goals for this year. I haven't published anything yet so there's nothing that I've written that can't be changed at this point, it's just a matter of actually doing it.

One of my goals for 2025 is to rewrite my urban fantasy manuscript Phoenix Rising. I wrote this book in two months, a year apart. It is the product of NaNoWriMo 2013 and 2014. I was very much in my True Blood era at the time and that influenced this book heavily. True Blood and the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning.

This book has lived rent free in my mind since I finished it, and I have attempted to rewrite it multiple times. I have rewritten a couple of scenes from it for various things like exercise prompts [There's actually an excerpt here from one of those prompts] or to use as excerpts for my ghostwriting portfolio.

I've grown a lot as a writer in the last decade. Not just my skill level but I'd even say my world-building/imagination and my understanding of genre. I've also lived a lot since 2014. Been more places. Have more experiences to draw from. And I've had a lot of time to let the ideas in this book marinate and bloom. I really want to rewrite it and dig into the Appalachian backdrop for the book. At the time I wrote it, I was still kind of running away from my Appalachian heritage, but now that I've come back to it and wholeheartedly embraced it, I want to honor the folklore of the region more in the worldbuilding for this book.

But don't worry, there will still be a very Eric Northman-coded vampire and a very Jericho Z. Barrons-coded mysterious ancient morally gray being. I won't forget the things that heavily inspired this original draft, which were those two franchises and my many, many trips on dark, curvy mountain roads pondering the mysteries of the ancient Appalachians.

After that, I really want to rewrite the manuscript I finished before that in 2012. It's a spy thriller! I won't go into it much here, but I've been toying with rewriting it as a soft sci-fi to give myself more leeway with the political organizations and spy tech and all of that stuff. We shall see! it needs to marinate a bit longer.

This is all dependent on how much free time I have with my contemporary romance novels. If one sells, then I'll have to dive back into the editing trenches and it will put my rewrite projects on the back burner.

I'm keeping my options open for 2025 though! And I'm chomping at the bit to get back to writing some fantasy.

Thanks for stopping by!

What about you? Do you want to rewrite something? Is it something you've already published? Or an old manuscript dying in the back of a drawer?

Drop a comment below.

Looking forward to traversing the blog hop this month.

Be sure to see my links for other places to keep up with me online and sign-up for my newsletter! I promise I won't spam you. I don't even have an onboarding auto-welcome post set up yet, but I am working on a reader magnet.

For now,

Rosie J.

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