Hi there and welcome to another moment of the mania! I'm Ann Shannon, the manic writer. I blog about PTSD, encouragement, and write book reviews and romantic fiction. My passion is the military, soldiers, and veterans, especially those with PTSD. I love that you stopped by, grab a drink and make yourself at home. Leave a comment or find me on social media, I'd love to meet you and get to know you.

 If you are a regular reader then you know that I use Fridays to update you a bit on the mania in my life.  It’s been a busy week, full of research, travel, catching up and JunoWrimo and I have a lot of catching up to do with my real work.

Champlain College

Last week I brought my daughter, who also aspires to write, to the CCYW, Champlain College Young Writers conference. It was amazing. Not only was it set on the banks of Lake Champlain in beautiful Burlington, VT but the people there were great as well.

My daughter learned a lot and not just about writing. She made new friends and had a three-day college experience. Which is to say she avoided me all weekend. Just as it should be.

I also learned a lot. There was a workshop for the chaperone's and I very much enjoyed not only the instructor but the other students as well. We were challenged to write a bit of a memoir and then share it. It was the first time I’d shared something so deeply personal to people sitting in the same room and it was moving. I loved hearing their stories, the way they described them and the emotion they conveyed with mere words on a page. Memoir and biography are not fields I ever intend to delve into, but I learned a lot from working with them, about myself and about writing.

I also learned that it is a long ride from my house to Burlington. Very long. It is, however, a beautiful ride and I am looking forward to returning with my younger daughter next year. She doesn’t intend to be a writer per se, but a Mangaka and I think the experience would open her eyes to more within the writing world.

Courtesy of JunoWriMo

In the meantime, JunoWriMo has begun and I have hardly worked on my books at all. I had planned to write the anthology and I have three of the five planned stories for it outlined and one begun. Unfortunately, when I started to write it I just wasn’t feeling it. I got roughly 3K words of the expected 8-10K needed and felt like it was flat. I’ve decided to change strategy, for now anyway and work on my final revision of Falling Star. Maybe I’ll pick the anthology up later in the month when I can focus more fully on a completely new project.

I’ve written or revised 4700 words so far this month which is disheartening because I’d like to move faster, but it just hasn’t been possible yet.

In other news, I purchased my very own domain! I’m so excited that I can hardly sit still. I am working on building my WordPress blog there and a few other things and then I will migrate everything over and leave a link for redirection. It will probably be July before I can launch it but next week I may have a preview link of the new site and my place-holder post.

I usually blog about PTSD and if you come here for that don't be discouraged by the different topic, this is what I do when I'm not talking about the subject that fills every corner of my life. I will be continuing to blog even while I write. It helps, a lot, to have something that I love to do and for me that's writing love stories! Even my husband gets in on the action, discussing books ideas, plots, and characters with me for hours. My work is available for free right now, just check out my links to the right. And make sure you make time for fun too!

It is my goal to end the stigma that comes with PTSD. I blog about PTSD once a week, searching the mountains of information out there and bringing you the best of what I find. I review a book on PTSD every other week and I publish a weekly encouraging reflection and tweet encouraging quotes for PTSD survivors daily, follow me to be encouraged. Together we can make a difference.

Courtesy of Northern Exposures

Hello there! If this is your first time visiting my blog welcome! Get a drink and pull up a chair, let the madness draw you in. I'm Ann Shannon, the Manic writer. I blog about PTSD, encouragement and I write book reviews and romantic fiction. My passion is the military, soldiers, and veterans, especially those with PTSD. I loved that you stopped by, leave me a comment or find me on social media. I'd love to meet you too and get to know you!

It's been a busy 2 weeks since my last journal update. I spent a lovely week in our capitol, Washington DC visiting as many places as we could. I've been to DC many times so some of what I saw was a repeat, but there is always more. I visited the Ford Theater for the first time and had a blast. I highly recommend it for your next trip. I also saw the Korean War memorial and the World War Two memorial for the first time, they are breathtaking.

So very true!

I walked a total of 57K steps in 3 days! Now if only I could manage that with my writing. 57K words in three days would put me in a coma I think. 50K is my total goal for the month of June, I can't imagine that in three days!

JunoWriMo begins on Monday! I will have a late start with it because I am chaperoning a writers conference that my daughter is attending this weekend and we return Monday morning. It'll be fine, I hope.

I'm a JunoWriMo newbie and not sure what to expect as the only WriMo I've participated in so far was April camp. I love the encouragement to get people writing and intend to participate whenever I can from now on. If you love writing why not join us too?

What have you been up to? Are you a writer, an artist? What do you do that makes you smile? Tell me about it, I'm always interested in what brings others joy.

It is my goal to end the stigma that comes with PTSD. I blog about PTSD once a week, searching the mountains of information out there and bringing you the best of what I find. I review a book on PTSD every other week and I publish a weekly encouraging reflection and tweet encouraging quotes for PTSD survivors daily, follow me to be encouraged. Together we can make a difference.

When I'm not blogging about PTSD or trying to encourage those of you living with it. I'm an author. I write romance. I just finished my first book and I am revising and editing it. With any luck, it will be published later this year, in the meantime you can get a sample of my work on the web. Original work can be found here, and fanfiction can be found here. Let me know what you think, and tell me how you found me!

Manic Moments and Quiet Moments

Hi there and welcome to another moment of the mania! I'm Ann Shannon, the manic writer. I blog about PTSD, encouragement and write book reviews and romantic fiction. I love that you stopped by, grab a drink and make yourself at home. Leave a comment or find me on social media, I'd love to meet you and get to know you.

I usually blog about PTSD and if you come here for that don't be discouraged by the different topic, this is what I do when I'm not talking about the subject that fills every corner of my life. I will be continuing to blog even while I write. It helps, a lot, to have something that I love to do and for me that's writing love stories! Even my husband gets in on the action, discussing books ideas, plots, and characters with me for hours. My work is available for free right now, just check out my links to the right. And make sure you make time for fun too!

Halfway through May today and I've been typing my little fingers away as I prepare for JunoWriMo. I am coming up on a very busy week and I wanted to be well prepared for a week off. This Sunday I will attend a local event here called CloverCon with my family. Three of us will be leaving from there for a field trip to Washington DC and returning later in the week. All that to say that I will be taking an enforced week off of writing as I don't own a laptop and I think I'd find it difficult to write away from home effectively.

We are looking forward to CloverCon. The girls went last year and had a blast. This year they will be cosplaying, both as characters from Naruto Shippuden. I will probably tweet pics of them so follow me on twitter and Instagram to see them.

Courtesy of Flickr

Then we will leave with friends of ours directly from the convention and head down to DC for a homeschool field trip. My husband will be home taking care of the dog and working, poor him. We are looking forward to our trip, but I think I will find it hard to not work.

One aspect of my writing mania is that I am compelled to write. I see a lot out there about making yourself make a habit of writing, and writing every day. Writing for me is like breathing, I can't not do it and taking almost a full week off will be challenging for me. As it is I take the weekends off and feel guilty despite working almost an 8 hr day Monday through Friday, all writing or writing related.

In the meantime, I've been preparing blog posts, editing my WIP and pre-writing my JunoWriMo project as when I return from DC I will have slightly more than a week before it begins. And another trip to prepare for before it.

Courtesy of Flickr

Ahh, the life of a writer! So romantic! Don't I wish?!

It is my goal to end the stigma that comes with PTSD. I blog about PTSD once a week, searching the mountains of information out there and bringing you the best of what I find. I review a book on PTSD every other week and I publish a weekly encouraging reflection and tweet encouraging quotes for PTSD survivors daily, follow me to be encouraged. Together we can make a difference.

JunoWriMo

So, CampNaNoWriMo is hardly over. The campfires are just cooling down and our sleeping bags need to be washed, but it's time for the next challenge because when you're a writer there is no such thing as downtime or vacation. My mind is always working on a story, or a character, or a PTSD blog post. I can't help it, it's how the madness manifests in me. As an author/writer/creator, I'm always working on something. So JuNoWriMo here I come!

CampNaNoWriMo was a huge success for me. I wrote 90K words! JuNoWriMo is a little different than camp though. The goal is preset, 50K words and I have a plan already!

I usually blog about PTSD and if you come here for that don't be discouraged by the different topic, this is what I do when I'm not talking about the subject that fills every corner of my life. I will be continuing to blog even while I write. It helps, a lot, to have something that I love to do and for me that's writing love stories! Even my husband gets in on the action, discussing books ideas, plots, and characters with me for hours. My work is available for free right now, just check out my links to the right. And make sure you make time for fun too!

One of the goals I have for JuNoWriMo is to write an anthology of short stories, four or five of them, and offer it up on Amazon for free. I think it's a great way for new readers to get a sample of my writing style and see if they like it. I have a series planned that I will begin sometime next year and I've decided that each of my short stories will be about one or two characters from the series.

Interested yet? The first story in the anthology is the most developed so far. It's called "The Table of Misfit Donors." I'll include the synopsis in a future update post.

Each story will cover a bit of their backstory or an unrelated story, so reading the short stories won't ruin anything for you in the series, it will just familiarize you with the characters a bit. I have three stories laid out, and characters for two of them outlined and I will be working on the rest of that this month in addition to editing and revising other works which can be found here on my blog.

I'm really looking forward to JuNoWriMo. It will give me a chance to work on a project I'd be too likely to put on the back burner. And, if I get myself in gear, it will free me up to re-read the novels I have in revision as I prepare for a second revision. You see, I am new to this fiction writing and it's going to be slow for me while I learn how to not bore you to death with my fumblings.

Subscribe to my blog, follow me on twitter or like me on Facebook so you too can follow my progress as I stumble along.

I usually blog about PTSD and if you come here for that don't be discouraged by the different topic, this is what I do when I'm not talking about the subject that fills every corner of my life. I will be continuing to blog even while I write. It helps, a lot, to have something that I love to do and for me that's writing love stories! Even my husband gets in on the action, discussing books ideas, plots, and characters with me for hours. My work is available for free right now, just check out my links to the right. And make sure you make time for fun too!