Susan Helene Gottfried

It is my pleasure to introduce those of you who haven’t already followed her back to her blog from here to Susan Helene Gottfried.  I first met Susan on the T13 circuit, but it was her Roadie Poet, and her ShapeShifter posts have keep me going back.  Thank you for being my guest, Susan.

So I’m finally grabbing a booth at Alice’s Restaurant. It took me and Alice an awfully long time to coordinate my being here, so not only do I need to thank Alice for wanting me here, I need to thank her for hanging in while we figured out the right time. Two women with busy lives… it’s not nearly as easy as you’d think.

One of the things that draws me and Alice together is our love of posting fiction to our blogs.

I started doing it as a way to build my audience for what will be my debut novel, Trevor’s Song. I was more comfortable letting the band and my characters speak for themselves. At the time, I didn’t know of anyone taking this approach. Surely, I thought, I’ll gain lots of attention for being different!

Well, I didn’t gain lots of attention. What I did get instead is lots of readers who fell in love with my band. This love runs so deep that when they asked, I answered: my second anthology of blog-published material will be coming out in print (and digital) form on September 12.

None of this would have happened without the phenomena of blog fiction. In short snippets designed to suck you in, or designed for you to sit down and curl up with a cup of coffee and an excuse to linger, blog fiction is the new soap opera.

Alice’s Suzy’s House is a great example of this. She does what I don’t do: she’s telling a story in a linear way. Start to finish, twists and turns. This takes a massive sort of planning I can’t even begin to comprehend.

Me, I fly by the seat of my pants. I get inspired by something big, small, suggested, or found and I sit down and write. My fiction is self-contained; you don’t need to know what’s happened in the past to be able to follow what’s going on. (I hope.) Some may call it the lazy way; they’re probably right.

The glorious thing about blogging is that there really isn’t a right way or a wrong way. Yeah, there are ways that’ll raise you in Google searches or page rank or whatnot. But is that what a writer should be focused on? Isn’t all about the story, the characters, and all that other goodness that lies at the structure of good fiction?

Of course it is. You only need to look at the comment trail at Suzy’s House to see it. If you haven’t joined in, it’s not too late, you know…

Wow. Thank’s, Susan. I wasn’t expecting a plug from you, but I like it. To anyone reading this, head on over to The Meet and Greet where Susan posts fiction as well as regular blog stuff. She shows Rock and Roll from the inside and outside in a way that will really capture you. It did me.

Update: Susan is giving away a book! The winner will be drawn from those commenting on this post. More details in a little while.

Update again: I’m doing the drawing tonight. If you want to be in on it, leave a comment here.