Amanda Hocking

I am excited to announce my new club called Mandy’s TBR Bookclub, after me (Mandy), and my To Be Read stack. The idea is that each month, I will pick a book from my TBR stack, and then set a date for a the discussion. On that day, I’ll post a review of the book on YouTube and my website, and then we’ll be able to discuss the book on social media. Eventually, I will like set up something so more life, but for the first one, I wanted to keep it more casual.

You can watch the video where I explain it more in depth, or you can read on below!

This month, I’m reading A Dark and Starless Forest by Sarah Howell!

When her siblings start to go missing, a girl must confront the dark thing that lives in the forest—and the growing darkness in herself—in this debut YA contemporary fantasy for fans of Wilder Girls.

On Friday, May 20, 2022 afternoon/evening, I will be on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram talking about A Dark and Starless Forest. I want it to be a fun, relaxed discussion where people can drop in when they want, and I’ll be there throughout the evening, replying and talking about the book.

I’m super excited for this. I’ve been wanting to read this book for awhile, but I just keep… not doing it. So I’m hoping this bookclub will help me dive through my TBR stack a bit faster.

To purchase a copy of A Dark and Starless Forest, head to Sarah Hollowell’s website: SarahHollowell.com

You can also check out Libby – a free ebook and audibook library: Libby App

This is the fifth week of my Writing on Wednesday (WoW) posts where I share the transcript of a recent writing vlog. You can check out the full video series: here, and you can read previous posts in my transcript series:

• WoW Week One: Writing Advice
• WoW Week Two: Updates, Bookplates, & Yellowjackets
• WoW Week Three: Return to Writing
• WoW Week Four: Handling Criticism & Controversy

This week’s video was first posted March 30, 2022, and it’s titled: Storytelling & Dreaming Big. You can watch the video below or read the lightly edited transcript beneath.

I’ve been talking about the Seven Fallen Hearts, and you’re probably like, “Hurry up, come out with the second book, already,” which is a totally reasonable thing to say. I have been working on it, and I want to get it just right, because I’m really in love with it, and I want you all to love it, too.

It’s going so well in this world. I’m putting creatures into in a way that I was weirdly holding myself back about in the past, and I’ve just kind of flung myself completely into the world, and I’m doing whatever feels right.

I don’t know how to explain it exactly, because I don’t want you all to think that I’m just throwing whatever at this book and hoping it sticks. There is a lot of thought going into this to make sure that it’s cohesive, but it’s also something that I am not holding myself back. In the past, I would tell myself, “Well, that’s too much, you can’t have that in there.” With this one, there really is nothing that’s too much for me. It’s all, “Yeah, that’s if we can this.”

That’s really been mantra. There is this line from Inception, and it’s one of my favorite quotes.

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”

I have to remind myself of that, too, because I am my own worst enemy. I am usually the thing standing in my own way and telling myself I can’t do something, when in reality, I can do so much more.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is why do we tell stories, and why do we choose to tell the stories that we tell. It is something that I really changed my whole onion about it over the past ten-plus years of my writing career.

With publishing, even with self-publishing, there can be sense of scarcity. Because everyone has only so much for reading, and there are so many other things competing with reading. Life is finite, free time is finite, shelf space is finite, and so there is this scarcity where we feel gotta compete, because we all want to get on the shelf and have our stories heard.

There is always going to be a feeling of competition when there’s a non-unlimited resource that people are vying for, whether it’s bestseller lists, shelf space, or anything else.

Initially when I started publishing, I did feel that more. I felt like I had to compete with other books, because I did want to stand out, and it was easy to get “it’s my book or theirs” kind of survivalist mentality about it.

But I don’t think that’s good, and I don’t recommend doing that. I am mostly past that now fortunately, but the way that changed for me is that my view on storytelling really changed.

There is something so beautiful about storytelling. It is one of our oldest art forms so intrinsic to our lives and our society that we don’t really think of it as an art. We can all be dismissive writing, especially fiction that focuses on romance or fantasy, but outside of specific classics or literary novels, writing is just often overlooked as anything special.

I saw a tweet last week that was clearly written to being inflammatory, to get outrage clicks and all that. It said something like, “How can anyone read fiction in times like this?” As if only non-ficiton is a valid thing, as if history books are the only arbiters of truth and the way educate, inform, and share.

I love non-fiction books, too. Don’t get me wrong. But I also love fiction of all kinds. Fiction is a way to tell things that we would be unable to tell otherwise, and fiction gives us this way to see it from a different perspective and allows us access to other experiences that we will never actually be able to have.

I’m not saying that just because you’ve read a book, you have experienced it. Just because I’ve read Slaughterhouse Five doesn’t mean I experienced WWII alongside Kurt Vonnegut – but it did allow me to see more and understand more about it, or at least about how Vonnegut experienced the war, in a way that I didn’t before I read it.

In fictional settings, the things the chracters go through hasn’t really happened, and often it’s so fantastical and far-removed from anything that actually could happen. But the emotions, their lives still have be grounded in some sense of realism, or it won’t resonate with readers.

That’s what storytelling is ultimately about. It is a way for people to connect, to share to feel.

Humans are one of the only animals that can tell stories, and especially stories with the complexity that we do. I believe that Koko the Gorilla could tell some basic stories, and there was an African Grey Parrot who could tell something like a story. But they were always simplistic based more on repetition than inventing characters or worlds. I’m definitely not trying to diminish the intelligence of these animals – they are incredibly smart – and I think that animals incapable of telling stories still have quite a bit of intelligence. Just because we’re measuring them on their linguistics doesn’t mean they don’t have knowledge or things to share.

But I think that storytelling is such a uniquely human thing, and it’s so incredibly important.

Even now, when you see the way information is conveyed, it’s always to do a snippet. They’re teaching you tropes in a way, so they can real quick get the whole story across, since they don’t think anyone has an attention span.

But the real point of is that conveying information is often a story. Everything is a story. We’re constantly telling stories about ourselves to ourselves – that’s what an inner monologue is. Stories are essential building blocks of our society, and everybody should be telling their story.

I think it’s so, so important, and I no longer abide by the idea of scarcity. Like, yes, scarcity does exist, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be telling your story. There are so, so many people on this planet, with so many experiences, so many lives, so much knowledge, so many mistakes, so many stories that could and should be shared.

Many story can be broken down into four basic conflicts: Human vs human, human vs nature, human vs self, human vs society. Depending on the story, I think Batman has done everyone of those, which is to say these are simplistic breakdowns.

But all of those conflicts an mean so many different things depending on how they’re told and who told them, and depenediing who you decide the main character is, and the depth, the struggle, and the scope of the conflict can change dramatically.

Everything is conveying information, and that’s the thing. Even if you think that you’re not, you still are, you just don’t know what you’re telling people.

You are telling this story for a reason. Because even if you’re like, “Well, I just like mysteries, so I want to write a mystery.” But if you’re writing a murder mystery, who you chose to be the detective and who you chose to be the criminal, where you set the book, how the crime is solved, I mean every little detail about it is saying something about you. It is as snapshot into your mind, into the life that you are living on this planet in the year 2022, regardless of when/where you set the book.

One of my favorite TV show is the OG Law & Order. I know it’s boring and basic, but I am boring and basic. I have watched my whole life, I have watched every episode dozens if not hundreds of times.

My absolute favorite part is the opening scene before the credits. The first two-five minutes snippet of some random New Yorker discovering a dead body – or sometimes a person missing or other crime, but it’s usually a dead body. It’ll just be a couple having a fight, or a man walking a dog, and then all of the sudden, they stumble across the body, and they’ve got nothing to do with the rest of the story (usually, but sometimes they do).

Anyway, I just it, because it’s this little snapshot. It says so much about New York, and the people who were writing the show, and the attitudes of the media and the US at the time of filming the episode. It’s fascinating, because the show has been on so long – twenty years originally, and now it’s back from a ten+ year hiatus. So, you watch a season one episode, and you get this tiny little snapshot into New York thirty years ago. I know it’s not 100% accurate or represntive of everything – nothing is – but it is still saying something about that time.

I love that. I love the way the stories we tell can’t help but reflect the world we live in and the author themselves. Not perfectly, not completely, but a distorted peek into another person’s life is still a very special thing.

With social media, people are offering peeks into their life all the time. People online are often lying, and they’re often telling the truth. It can be very confusing, because so many stories are being told, and some are twisted, and we want to trust the people that we like. That can make it even more difficult when people are deliberately being bad actors, who con and lie and manipulate.

But I honestly think the solution for that, as strange as it sounds, is for more people to share their stories. Voices and information that was hidden can come to light. People want to share, to be heard, to learn from others, to build a community. In the US, I see a real desperation for community and a sense of identity. How many social media bios are just a list of nouns to define an identity? People want to be seen for who they believe they are.

That is one thing that I try to do with my books. Again, they are not perfect, and I struggle and make mistakes. But my main goals with them is to give you a little bit of an escape for a bit, relief from the stress of life, and you know that there’s going to be a (mostly) happy ending at the end of the books, when there is no promise of that in life. But I also want my readers to feel seen and validated, and to have their experiences feel validated. Because I know there are times when I see characters, and I get to really see myself, and it’s beautiful and humbling.

When they talk about representation matters, and people can be dismissive of it. But the people who are dismissive tend to be the ones that have always been represented, so they don’t know what it’s like.

That is what I’m trying to do with my stories.

However, I know there’s so many things that I’ve internalized from the stories I’ve heard, that I’ve read, and I know so many other people have heard and read those stories, too. Internalized biases like that, they aren’t things that anyone deliberately chooses. It’s just that the story has been repeated over and over again, and now you’ve got the refrain stuck in your head.

But that’s also why I want everyone out there to tell their story. The refrains won’t exactly be the same, and we aren’t going to have the exact same repetitions. I’m sure we’ll all make mistakes. We’ll find all new tropes to be harmful. But the only way we can move forward is take we keep taking steps, even if that means sometimes we’ll have missteps.

What really got me into thinking about storytelling as communication and as an artform was Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. The opening quote of the show at the end of the credits was this:

When people told themselves their past with stories, explained their present with stories, foretold the future with stories, the best place by the fire was kept for the storyteller.

– Jim Henson’s The Storyteller

Television, plays, even the written word in general, they haven’t been around that long, not in the scheme of things. But the spoken word has been around for thousands and thousands of years. We’re talking anywhere from 50,000-150,000 years ago.

We’ve been telling stories so much longer than we’ve been able to document the telling of them. The mediums and the rules we have now about constructing novels or scripts, those are actually very, very new in terms of specific definitions, but stories were common things for a millennium.

but they were common things that were

I would really to write a prehistoric story someday. It’s very ambitious, so I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it, but I would love to write something about humanity when we just learned to tell stories. I find the whole concept so fascinating, because other animals aren’t able to do it, not anywhere near to the degree that we do.

I’m always trying to learn more about it, and I definitely don’t think that I am an excerpt storyteller now. But I don’t think you have to be an expert to tell stories.

Stephanie Perkins, the fabulous author of Anna and the French Kiss, There’s Someone Inside Your House, and The Woods are Always Watching, recently shared an quote from Amy Poehler that really resonated with me.

“Do it even if you don’t think you’re ready… a lot of women wait until they think they’re really really ready for something. And I’ve worked with a lot of guys who aren’t ready for what they’re doing.”

– Amy Poehler to young female directors.

She mentioned women specifically, but I don’t think it necessarily falls along gender lines or that it’s that binary. There are people who jump in feet first, and there are people who hold themselves back, constantly second-guessing themselves. I don’t think we should be doing that, especially not with having our voices heard.

The more people are allowed to share, the more that people feel heard, and the more that people actually heard – that we’re having this real conversation of listening, of sharing each other’s pain and our joys, our struggles and triumphs, the better the world would be.

I think there is a big issue with people feeling like they’re not being heard, and so many people have not been heard for a long time. Getting to a point where we can communicate honestly en masse is a huge hurdle, but it is one that I think humanity is going to have to figure out if we want to move forward.

But anyway, circling back to what I said originally, you mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger.

That is the way I am trying to live my life now. I’m trying not to be afraid to dream bigger, and to go forward with my head high and my heart open.

I am excited about what’s to come. I mean, it is hard to be excited about anything in the world right now, but life is still… it’s still everything. It can be messy, cruel, complicated, and disgusting, but ti’s also beautiful, wonderful, fulfilling, and all that there is. It’s all that we have are these lives.

I spent so much of my early life being very depressed and anxious. Honestly, I am consistently happy for maybe the first time in my life, in a way that I never was before. These past few years have required a lot of therapy to get to this point, a lot of retraining and reframing things. But a huge lesson for me was how may times I have held myself back, how many times because of lack of therapy and bad brain chemistry and other things – because I am not trying to say that you should blame yourself for your depression, and I am not even blaming myself anymore. But the fact is that I was miserable for a long time, and I don’t want to be anymore. I don’t feel bad about that.

I mean, I feel about all the terrible, inhumane things happening in the world wright now, and I try to do as much as I can to make life better, to be kind and to help others when I can. But obviously, I’m not always getting it right.

But it’s the only way I know to live my life.

I don’t know. Maybe I got too deep there at the end, and I have definitely talked long enough.

I hope that wherever you are, you are staying safe, happy, and healthy. If you have a story to tell, I think you should tell. Don’t hold yourself back, and don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger.

Until next time, stay safe, be kind, and happy writing.

This is the fourth week of my Writing on Wednesday (WoW) posts where I share the transcript of a recent writing vlog. You can check out the full video series: here, and you can read previous posts in my transcript series:

• WoW Week One: Writing Advice
• WoW Week Two: Updates, Bookplates, & Yellowjackets
• WoW Week Three: Return to Writing

This week’s video was first posted March 23, 2022, and it’s titled: Handling Criticism and Controversy. You can watch the video below or read the lightly edited transcript beneath.

Hello, I am Amanda Hocking, and I’m here with my chinchilla, Gruber. Recently, I posted a short video of Gruber, and I got some questions about him so, I thought it would be fun to incorporate him into the video. I know not many people have experiences with chinchillas.

Usually when I take him out of his cage, and we’re chilling together, his favorite thing to do is sit behind my neck or on my shoulders. He does a little bit of exploring, but he most just likes to sleep around my neck. Sometimes, he likes to curl up on my chest, but that’s not very often.

He also has very distinct moods, and sometimes he’s in a mood for a cuddle, and other times he is not.

Gruber is a four-year-old domestic chinchilla. If you’re not familiar, chinchillas are so mammals from the rodent family. They seem more like rabbits than hamsters to me, but I think they’re actually a type of ground squirrel almost. Like hamsters and most rodents, chinchillas teeth never stop growing, so they always have to have things to chew on to help wear them down. Dental care is one of the biggest issues that rodents have to deal with in general.

Chinchillas are originally from Chile in South America. They lived in the Andes Mountains, where their incredibly dense fur helped them thrive in chilly temperatures.

That is the reason that actually became domesticated. They have the densest fur of any land mammal. Most mammals have one hair per follicle, but chinchillas have fifty hairs per follicle. Their fur is very thick and plush, like a velvety stuffed animal, and they were brought to America to be bred for the fur industry.

Because of the density of their fur, they can’t get wet. If water gets down to the roots, it doesn’t dry, and they can become moldy and have a little of issues. To keep clean, they use dust baths, which helps remove the oils and debris from their fur.

In the wild, they live in large groups, and they are very social. They like to talk a lot, and they made distinct sounds and have clear communications to express their moods and wants.

Gruber makes a very grumpy chirp when I do something he doesn’t like (usually touching anywhere near his backend, most chinchillas don’t like that). He also has contended noises when we’re cuddling, and he makes a cute kind of cooing chirp in his cage when he wants attention or wants to play.

Gruber has had some aggression with male chinchillas, so that is why he is an only chinchilla, but it is generally recommended that chinchillas live in pairs or small groups up to three or four. They are large rodents, so they need very substantially sized cages, and the more chinchillas that are kept together, the larger the cage should be.

Gruber was on my first chinchilla. I have always wanted one, but I was unsure about getting one because they are an exotic pet. They are one of the least exotic pets, I would say, because they are relatively common, and they aren’t overly difficult to care for. They need cooler temperatures, large cages, dust baths, and they do have strict diets.

Gruber loves treats, especially apple sticks and oats. Treats do need to be given very sparingly to chinchillas, because they are prone to obesity and diabetes. All of their favorite treats tend to relatively high in sugars, and they need a diet very low in sugar. I feed Gruber Oxbow chinchilla pellets and timothy hay every day, and he gets sticks frequently to chew on.

Chinchillas can also be very destructive (they love to chew!), but I have been really fortunate with Gruber. He only really chews on the wooden toys and treats he’s supposed to, which is great.

Gruber is relatively young at only four-years-old, because they can live ten-fifteen years or more in captivity. He’s just such a happy little guy, and I hope that he lives for a very long time.

Chinchillas make good pets for older teens and adults, but they are so fragile and jumpy that I would not recommend them for younger children. They are mostly quiet and don’t really stink, but they create a lot dust and fur. They also have a long life expectancy for a rodent, and they have very specific dietary requirements.

Initial cost for adopting a chinchilla can be rather high because of their large cages and the cost of the animal itself, but the monthly maintenance costs are very low. They also do require a vet who specializes in exotics and small animals, because they have specific healthcare needs, especially with their teeth and their propensity for diabetes.  

So onto my writing advice for today. There has been come controversy happening on Twitter. (There’s always controversy happening on Twitter, lol). It has me thinking about writers need to learn how to respond to reviewers and appropriate ways to interact with people who have read your book, with they be fans or critics or anything in between.

As an author, it can be really easy to have a knee-jerk reaction if you read something critical about your book. You work so hard on something, and it’s so personal. Even when you know that you’re making this book be commercially sold, writing is still so incredibly personal.

When you’re publishing a book, you’ll always have other people working on it, whether you’re self-publishing or with a traditional publisher. You’ll have editors, marketers, beta readers, sometimes even cover artists. Other people will read your book and offer feedback that, hopefully, makes it better.

But actually writing the book is still largely a solo activity. You singularly built this world inside your head, and so it can be really hard not to take it personally when someone says, “Well, this world sucks.”

Just to be clear, it is totally okay to be hurt by reviews. At times, reviews can even feel like pointed attacks, and I have read plenty of reviews – on books and movies in general – that are blatantly mean. That is okay to be hurt by those reviews, and even the ones that aren’t mean.

But the number one thing you need to do when that happens is that you need to grieve and rage about it in private. It can’t be something that you go online and publicly vent about, and you should never, ever interact negatively with a reader or critic.

Unless of course they are being abusive – using slurs or making threatening remarks. In that case, still don’t engage with them, but you should report them.

Otherwise, you basically just have to accept that that’s how they feel. Because that’s the bottom line. People are entitled to feel how they feel, and all forms of media – books, movies, music, tv shows – elicit feelings from the person consuming them.

The thing, too, about reviews is that they say something about the thing their reviewing, but they also say a lot about the person reviewing them. The reviewers bring in their own biases, baggage, and moods into it.

Sometimes, if the readers baggage matches yours, you can really strike a chord with them, and you can really make sense to them. That’s your reader, that’s the person you’re writing for.

But there are still going to be people who read your books, and it just doesn’t mesh with them. They might have valid criticisms, they might just have personal quibbles. The point is that your book just isn’t for them.

If they do reviews, they are going to explain why your book isn’t for them, and that’s also okay. You just have to learn to accept it.

Do not attack them. Do not call them names. Do not harass them or call them out on social media, not in any capacity. People are allowed to not enjoy the things you create, and that’s a huge bummer, but that’s just how life is.

If you are someone who wants to have a career in the public life – well, even if you don’t necessarily want, but in being a writer you are in the public life – you need to treat everything you say online as if the public will see it. Even if it’s just in an email or any kind of private correspondence, all of it can easily go public these days.

I always caution you to be very careful ranting about book reviews or readers or anything like that online. That needs to be done in the privacy of your home with the person you trust the most.

I’m not saying that you are not allowed to have private thoughts or private feelings. But I am saying that unfortunately, right now, nothing online ever truly is private. You do need to cautious about what you’re doing and saying.

I have kind of talked about this before, but I really feel like every word I put out there, I have to be able to defend. So every choice I make, I have to be able to explain it.

If people say something I am saying or said is objectional, then I am going to make changes when I can and when I think it’s appropriate.

There is some sexism in the My Blood Approves series. I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not to edit it. But it has felt disingenuous to change it. I mean, it is an idea that I really struggle with.

Because now I’ve done the Virtue re-release, but that was different. I knew I wanted to expand on the world, but when I re-read it, I saw the fat-shaming, sexism, and other weird stuff I had in there, and I needed to unpack it and remove it if I wanted to continue in the world. That’s why I did the re-release of Virtue. I couldn’t stand by the choices I had made ignorantly in the past, and I couldn’t build a world on them.

But in the past, if I had thought about the choices I was making more critically then, really questioned why I was being so gross and shaming to characters I liked, characters who were kind and didn’t deserve it, and I might have become more aware of the internalized bias and prejudices that I had. Maybe I would’ve felt better about myself sooner.

It is hard for people to see their own biases. We can have a blindspot for faults and prejudices, but it I something that I am working on.

me to see because the blind spot i have

Defending the choices I make in turn makes me make wiser choices. If I decide to make a character fat, for example, and I ask myself why. If the answer is because there are fat people in the world, and I want to show them having full lives and going adventures, then I am going to make a more conscious effort of having that character be someone who just happens to be fat but also has a full-life. As opposed to in the past, where I would make a character fat because I wanted to compare the character to thin main characters, to use them as a negative to show how someone else was positive.

I was never thinking these as conscious thoughts. I mean, I’ve always been fat, and I wasn’t thinking, “Let’s be mean to this fat character as an expression of your own self-loathing.” But I wasn’t questioning why I was doing it. I wanted to make my main character look good, and I didn’t question why I chose a fat person to do that.

This is what I mean by questioning your choices and defending your work. But to do that, it is important that you understand why you write the way you do. Especially in this day in age, people are going to question your choices, and you should have the answers.

It’s helped me with my internalized body-hating, which was something I needed to work on for myself and for others. I don’t want to be someone who feels that way about myself, and I especially don’t want to be someone who treats other people like they’re “less than” just because of their body.

As a young adult author especially, it’s just so important to me that I am really thinking about how my words can affect my audience that’s reading it. Because some of these people are very young teenagers, and so I have to be sure that I am not reinforcing things that will be harmful to them. I don’t want to do anything that will make my readers hate themselves or other people.

Ultimately, we have to share this world all kinds of people, and I think that the world is better when we’re kinder to ourselves and each other.

Gruber is getting sick of me talking, so I think I’ll be wrapping things up here. But for general updates on me, I just want to talk about Book #2 in the Seven Fallen Hearts series. It’s going really well, but I don’t have any dates yet. Things are moving forward, and I’m getting back into the habit of making videos. I’m having fun, though, and I hope you are, too.

If you have any questions about writing, my books, chinchillas, or anything at all really, feel free to ask, and I will try to answer them in later videos.

I enjoy this time talking to you all, and I hope that you enjoy it, too. I just want to say thank you again for watching.

Until next time, stay safe, be kind, and happy writing.

Read on in the next post, WoW #5: Storytelling and Dreaming Big

This is the third week of my Writing on Wednesday (WoW) posts where I share the transcript of a recent writing vlog. You can check out the full video series: here, and you can read previous posts in my transcript series:

• WoW Week One: Writing Advice
• WoW Week Two: Updates, Bookplates, & Yellowjackets

This week’s video was first posted March 19, 2022, and it’s titled: A Return to Writing on Wednesdays. You can watch the video below or read the lightly edited transcript beneath.

Hello, I’m Amanda Hocking, and I am back with a new video. I know it’s been awhile. I was kind of waiting to record, because I wanted to wait until I had more news about the next book in the Seven Fallen Hearts series – and I do have news, which I’ll get to in just a minute – but I’m still not finished with it.

But now I want to get back into Writing on Wednesdays, so I am going to talk about some writing advice and share some updates.

So the updates. I have been working on the Seven Fallen Hearts, and I have been loving it so much. It is so, soooo good. You all are going to have so much fun with this series. Like I’m having so much fun with it, so I’m assuming you will, too.

I have just been thinking, whatever is fun, let’s do it. I’m not second guessing myself very much, so we’ll see how that works out.

I had to step away from this project for a little bit to work on something else that I’m not able to talk about right now, but maybe someday, I’ll be able to. I mean, someday, I’ll definitely talk to you all about it, but I just don’t want to say anything until I know if it’s a good thing or a nothingburger.

But so I had work on this other thing for a little but, so that was a delay in writing Book #2, but it was a good delay – trust me. Sometimes life works that way. I feel so guilty because this book is going to be out later than I originally thought, and I am just getting back into writing and self-publishing again. Now that I can set my own deadlines, I’m figuring out what works for me and how longs actually take versus how long I project them to take. So my first few times back at the bat aren’t going to be perfect, but I am hoping to get better about release dates as I go along.

But it really just me figuring out how long it takes me to get things done. I am my main boss, now. I mean, the readers and me are my only real bosses, and so I try to take feedback from you all. But then I ultimately know that I have to make the choices that work for me and the stories I want to tell.

So, yes, I’m at hard at work writing the Seven Fallen Hearts series. I’m enjoying it so much, and I’ve been sharing mood boards on Instagram and TikTok. For mood boards, I take images that I find on Pinterest, and I put them together in a board with music to really set a mood or evoke an emotion. That’s how I get in the zone for writing.

I also did see The Batman (2022) a couple of weeks ago, and I absolutely loved it. I just adored it. I wasn’t sure about it at first. I have been so grumpy about it, and I have so many thoughts about Batman in general. I was so grumpy about the idea of a new Batman, but honestly, I loved it. It was so great. It reminded me of The Crow in a really good way, and I feel like after I saw The Batman, I was really thinking about how it made me love The Crow more and The Dark Knight a little less.

But I don’t dislike The Dark Knight at all. It’s still an amazing movie, but maybe not my favorite one anymore.

I have been really lucky, though, in that I’ve liked most of the Batmans (Batmen?). Not all of them, but most of them. I love Adam West, Michael Keaton Christian Bale, Robert Pattison, Kevin Conroy, Deidrich Bader, and Will Arnett. So yeah, I just really like Batman, and there have been a lot of talented actors who have gotten to play him.

But I have weirdly been one of those people who is like, “Do we really need more Batman stuff?” And the answer to that is apparently, “Yes, yes we do.”

The music is like the best thing I’ve ever heard. The music, oh my gosh. It’s Michael Giacchino who is the composer, and he’s already one of my favorites. He took elements of “Ava Maria” and also “Something in the Way” by Nirvana and kind of mixed them together. You can also hear influences from other Batman scores. Occasionally there’s a little note of Danny Elfman (who composed Batman 1989) and Hans Zimmer (who did The Dark Knight trilogy). It has subtle nods to them, and I really enjoyed it overall. I gave it a 10/10.

That’s my recommendation. If you’re not busy writing go see The Batman.

Onto my writing advice. This is actually something I just learned this week, and it’s embarrassing how obvious it is. I realized that a bit part of my problem with why my books have errors even when I edit and revise sooo much. People are like, “There’s errors in your books,” and I’m like “I know, I don’t understand it, but I know.” I have editors and I’m constantly reading and revising and editing it.

And therein lies the issue. I never actually stop revising. I am compulsively editing and changing things, and every time I change something – even something small – it can have a ripple effect.

So then when I go to fix those ripples, I change something new, and then create new ripples, and then it goes on and on forever. But I can’t stop myself. Every single time I read my books, I make changes. Every single time.

There has to get to a point where I am no longer making any revisions or changes to the story. If the phrasing is clunky, it needs to just stay that way, and the only thing I’m doing is correcting punctuation and spelling, nothing more. And I have never gotten to that point. Especially with self-publishing, I’m literally always making changes right up until publication.

I have gotten myself really stuck in a loop, where I am so obsessed with correcting any errors that I am actually constantly creating more errors, which is in turn making me revise even more, blah blah blah, the endless loop continues.

So, I am changing up how I do things. Once I am done with revisions, I have to let my edits just be punctuation and spelling errors, nothing more. I am going to go back and re-edit with this in mind for Virtue, so I should have a more error-free version of it up around the time of the second book’s release.

That is my writer’s tip. You have to stop revising your books eventually.

That’s basically what I’ve learned after doing this for over a decade. You can’t constantly write a book. You have to stop at some point.

People ask me advice, but I am constantly learning new stuff. I know more about writing and publishing than I did years ago, but I do still have more to learn. I am constantly growing and changing as a writer, and I am hoping that eventually I will be able to be exactly the writer I want to be.

There are some things that I do really well, and there are some things that I struggle with.

Not everyone has to like everything I write, and that’s something too that I have to remember. Sometimes I am doing something badly, but other times, this book might not be the right book for them or I am not the right author for them.

There are plenty of authors that I know are very talented, and they have written books that sound like I should love them. For some reason, though, I just don’t. That’s true with any entertainers – musicians, actors, comedians, puppeteers. Some of them I just don’t enjoy, and that doesn’t mean that they are doing anything wrong, or that I’m doing anything wrong. Their thing just isn’t my thing, and that’s okay.

I’m learning to accept that I may not be everyone’s flavor. Figuring out how to be a better author does not mean that everyone will enjoy my books, either. But I’ll figure out who I am and trying to better my self until the day. Or at least I hope so.

Next week I will be back with another Writing on Wednesday video. I recorded this one on Wednesday, which means I won’t have it posted until Thursday, but I was like, “That’s not an excuse to wait until next week to start. Do it today.” That’s what I said to myself, and honestly, that is good advice.

Don’t wait until next week. Do it today if it’s something you actually want to have done. Unless it’s something that hurts you or someone else. In which case, probably don’t do that.

It was a beautiful day here in Minnesota, and I hope wherever you, you are staying safe, happy, and warm, and that good things are coming you’re way. I always hope that for everyone, but right now, the world feels so tumultuous, and so I’m just putting that out there. I do hope that you are doing well.

I will be back next week with more updates about my writing and more advice on writing and publishing. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this, and I also like getting to know what people want to hear, what resonates with them, so I can give you more of the content that you’re looking for. So comment below and let me know if there is anything you’d like me to talk about it.

Until next time, stay safe, be kind, and happy reading.

Read on in the next post, WoW #4: Handling Controversy and Criticism

This is the second week of my Writing on Wednesday posts where I share the transcript of a recent writing vlog. You can check out the full video series: here, You can read previous posts in my transcript series:

• WoW #1: Writing Advice

This week’s video was first posted February 17, 2022, and it’s titled: Release Dates, Bookplates, & Yellowjackets. You can watch the video below or read the lightly edited transcript beneath.

Hello, I’m Amanda Hocking, and I’m finally recording a video for my weekly writing advice series. I have not been able to record in my office for a little while, because we had a water heater leakage. The utility room is right across from my office, and we had storage in there. But with the water, all the stuff from the utility room was moved into my office.

The water heater was fixed, and now I’m moving everything back into storage. I’m also cleaning up and reorganizing my office, so it’s not in a filmable state right now.

I tried filming in the living room, and the dogs think they need to be in the center of everything, and the cat does, too. So I’m here, filming in my bathroom.

In my last video, I said I hoped to have more information about the Seven Fallen Hearts, and I don’t have much yet. I’m still working on Book #2, and it’s going well, but it’s not ready for release date and pre-order info quite yet.

I’m also hoping to open up a shop on my website soon. It’s taking me awhile because I’m so apprehensive, and I want to make sure that I’m doing it right. I just want to make sure that I’m not signing up for more than I can deliver, and so I am being very cautious and moving very slowly.

When the shop does open, I will be selling signed bookplates. As we get closer, I’ll show you what they look like and explain more about them. The idea behind that is that I think it will be easier having stickers on hand selling autographed books, because this way I don’t have to keep an inventory of my books in stock. A bookplate can go in any book. This way you won’t have to rebuy a copy of a book that you already have, either.

Assuming this all goes well, in the future, I may have limited signed copies of new releases and maybe other books on special occasions. But I want to see how it goes with bookplates before I start adding stuff on.

Eventually, I would like to add things like bookmarks and artworks, but again, I’m starting very slowly, so it may be a while.

I am hopeful that the shop will open sometime this Spring, and that the second book in the Seven Fallen Hearts will be out by the end of Spring 2022.

I am really excited about Seven Fallen Hearts series. This this world is so fun, and I am really excited for you guys to see what’s coming. You can read more about the first book: here.

I’ve just been working on all that and taking care of my animals and my family. That’s basically what it keeps me busy. I have a big TBR pile that I am going through way too slowly.

Also, I just wanted to do a quick mention for the Yellowjackets. I watched Yellowjackets on Showtime. It’s this really cool, gritty series. I absolutely love it. I can talk about it forever if you guys are interested.

I loved it so much, and I could tell it is it is there are similar themes that it touches on as Bestow the Darkness. Which is my gothic romance folk horror novel that I released in 2021. It’s different, but there’s a lot of similar themes and topics. I could tell that we’re inspired by a lot of the same things, and so I very much love Yellowjackets.

I think it’s going to be an exciting spring, and I think there’s a lot of good stuff coming. I’m very optimistic about 2022 even though I was really optimistic about 2020.

I am getting back into writing advice on Wednesdays, so please leave a comment or question about anything you’d like to hear me talk about it, and I will likely address it in a future video. I am always open to suggestions, and I want to know what you all think.

That is it for today. As always says, stay safe, be kind, and happy reading.

Read on in next week’s post WoW #3: Return to Writing.