About

Welcome to my blog. Call me Sue B. I am a retired NICU nurse and writer. Nursing paid the bills. Writing is my passion.

My nursing career has also given me many story ideas and I am published in two nursing anthologies, “Ordinary Miracles in Nursing” and “Inspiring the Inspirational.” I have also written journal articles and newsletter dealing with health care and other more general topics. I am published in Family Fun magazine, Religious Teachers’ Journal, Nursing, Pediatrics, which are all national magazines.  I have stories in several local magazines and newsletters. One story is in Chicken Soup for the Veteran’s Soul about the North Platte canteen during WWII. Columnist Bob Greene wrote a best-seller called Once Upon a Town about the canteen, three years after my story was published in Chicken Soup.

I am currently working on my first novel. Novel-writing is much different from short stories and magazine articles, as I am finding out the further I delve into it. I am used to short projects–get it done and move on to the next idea. I don’t “get lost” when writing short stories. With a novel, there are details to keep track of.

I am used to writing “on the fly,” with no particular outline or plan. You can do that with short stories. I research the material then pound out the words. Done. Not so with novel-writing.

I was told I needed to identify my genre. That was difficult at first but I finally figured out that it is an urban fantasy because one of the characters is a ghost. A member in one of the writers’ groups I’m in commented that it is the first story he’s read where the ghost is influenced by the living instead of, like in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the ghosts influence the living person.

With short stories and magazine articles, I am also used to editing as I go. I have been advised that it is best to get the entire novel on paper before editing. No matter how bad it is, get it down and get it done. The formula I have heard is–write 1000 words a day and your novel will be done in 3 months.

Revisions can be endless. There is an interesting article in a recent Writers’ Digest about writers who constantly edit and revise. The premise is that, like Leonardo Davinci, we want perfection, so we continue to work on our book, never satisfied, and some writers never finishing. The article says that Davinci considered his works incomplete even to death.

As I journey through my novel, I am blogging about things I have noticed or experienced as a writer. I hope my sharing is useful to you. Come back and visit often. Leave your ideas and comments. Let me know how your writing is going and what your experiences are as well.

(P.S. I also have a blog called “Celtic Omaha” for those of you who are interested in the Irish music scene and events in Omaha.)