Writing groups, marketing my pig, and making time to write

The other day, we drove to Bosque del Apache to see the snow geese and sandhill cranes. The Bosque is one of the few places to find open water in New Mexico, and it is a haven for many thousands of migratory birds. It was a welcome respite from my writing and marketing, as fun as those activities are.

Once a month, I make the 40-mile trek south on I-25 and east on I-10, past the smelly stockyards of Vado, over the Texas line (“Drive Friendly—It's the Texas Way”), and head for the Dorris van Doren Library and the monthly meeting of the El Paso Writer's League. They have just put up a website, which no doubt will grow and prosper.

That’s the week after Mesilla Valley Writers meet in Las Cruces, and I try to be active in both.

Then there is the admin work for the Internet Writers Workshop and the reviewing and web work for the Internet Review of Books. And every so often, but not nearly often enough, I hook up by Skype with my old writer’s group who are in Massachusetts.

All of this, and I am trying to market When Pigs Fly a little better than in 2007. It looks to me as though gift stores may be the best retail market for my book; the bookstores want a bigger margin than iUniverse is willing to give, and then in a bookstore, my WPF would be just one more book competing for attention. In a gift shop, there might be little or no direct competition. So that’s the new focus for 2008.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just sit down and do some extensive writing? I have started three different novels in the last year without making a whole lot of progress on any of them. But I think—maybe—I have the story I want to stick with. Now to actually write it...