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Judy Corry is the USA Today Bestselling Author of YA and Contemporary Romance. She writes romance because she can’t get enough of the feeling of falling in love. She’s known for writing heart-pounding kisses, endearing characters, and hard-won happily ever afters. She lives in Southern Utah with the boy who took her to Prom, their four rambunctious children and a dog. She’s addicted to love stories, dark chocolate and notebooks.
One thing writers love more than actually writing is giving advice about writing (and then not following that advice) and the MOST IMPORTANT THING I’ve always heard is that after you finish a first draft, you must put it away.
The first step in setting goals is to figure out what you want to accomplish. You probably already have ideas knocking around in your head, so WRITE THEM DOWN. It doesn’t matter if these goals feel too lofty or aspirational or impossible. If it’s what you want, make it a goal. Want to learn to knit? Get it on paper. Got hankering to play the guitar? You know what to do. Need to lose the quaran-fifteen? Set down the Cheezits and add it to the list.
I’ve heard it said that people with high-functioning anxiety—like myself—did really well the first few months of the pandemic and shelter-at-home orders, but by the end of the summer, it all caught up to me (which I discussed a bit in my last post.) While a lot of it can be blamed on the constant, low-level stress that’s been a part of all of our lives, quite a bit of it is because of bad habits I’ve allowed myself to fall into. I know we’re supposed to be cutting ourselves some slack during all this, but we don’t know how much longer our lives will be in this altered state and I feel like my options are to either keep floundering or adjust to this new normal.
Writers’ block is as much a part of writing as actually writing, and the reasons for getting stuck could fill an entire book (eh, see what I did there?). For centuries writers have commiserated over the shared misery of being stuck, or not knowing what comes next and having no idea how to work themselves out of a proverbial corner.
It should not come as a shock to anyone who knows me that I’m terrible at resting. Pausing. Catching my breath. (And that’s despite having the word breathe tattooed on my wrist.)
Chasing the Sun, the first book in The Campfire Series, is a dual-POV young adult contemporary romance that was inspired by the 2017 total solar eclipse and I’m SO EXCITED for you to read it!!
I finished writing my TENTH novel! I can’t fully give credit to social isolation. I’ve been closing in on ‘the end’ for several weeks so all it took was me continuing to write in the morning, as is my normal schedule. But as we can attest, these past few weeks have been anything but normal.
It took me close to a year to settle on a system that works for me, and since then I have talked to countless people about my method. The most common thing I hear is “I wish I could do something like this.” A couple friends have even gone so far as to buy the journal, but that’s as far as they get. So I am here NOW to break down my system with LOTS of pictures to show you that this isn’t rocket science. It’s not even science. It’s just a notebook and pretty pens and about 10-15 minutes per week.
Welcome to a special edition of the Getting to Know… series. Today’s guest is Emmy, the main character in my short story, Sunflowers and Lavender, which is part of the romance anthology, Love on Main. The anthology comes out on February 11, 2020 and this interview is part of a series of main character interviews.