Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!
Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer – aim for a dozen new people each time – and return comments. This group is all about connecting! Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog! Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can’t find you to comment back.
Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!
Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.
Every month, we announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say.
Remember, the question is optional! March 4 question – What elements do you include in your book launch? Or what do you have in mind for your future book launch? Or what advice do you have to offer to others planning to launch a book?
I’m over at the Insecure Writer’s Support Group main website. Check my post out here. I’m talking about book launches.
The witch had violet hair, a raven tattoo that blinked when she signed books, and the audacity to set her signing table between Self-Help and Spellcraft.
Julian had only wandered into the bookstore to find a copy of The Existential Brooding of Owls, but the table, the glittering pen, and the woman holding court with a line of enchanted customers distracted him.
“Would you like your fortune with that?” she asked the woman ahead of him, who squealed and clutched her newly signed copy of Midnight Hexes & Herbal Regrets.
Julian did not get in lines. Not for book releases, not for coffee, not even for stardust pancakes at his cousin’s elven wedding. But he stayed where he was, because the witch had laughed—and it sounded like bells ringing at a funeral. Mournful. Beautiful.
When it was his turn, she looked up.
“Let me guess.” Her gaze slid over him like a warm wind through the Veil. “You’re here for the owls.”
He blinked. “How—”
“The Existential Brooding of Owls. Section 3B. Last copy’s hiding behind a grimoire on sentient fungi.” She tapped her temple. “My familiar listens to regrets.”
A small black cat on the table blinked at him with one golden eye. The other was a whirlpool of stars.
Julian swallowed. “I’m not here for regrets.”
She tilted her head. “Pity. That’s my specialty.”
She offered a book. Her book. The cover was embossed in purple ink that shimmered when touched. He brushed a finger over the title: Book of Binding Hearts: A Witch’s Guide to Love, Loss, and Lesser Hexes.
“You expect me to read this?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Only if you want something to happen.”
“To me?”
“To anyone.”
Julian hesitated. “I don’t do witchy things.”
“Neither did I,” she said, “until my ex cursed my houseplants and my left kneecap.”
He opened the book. A slip of paper fluttered out. It was blank on one side. The other read:
He’s late, but he’s here. —Future You
Julian looked up, heart thudding. “Is this some sort of trick?”
“I prefer the term ‘invitation.’” She rested her chin on her hands, watching him like a cat sizing up a songbird. “Or prophecy. Depends on the paper stock.”
He nearly left. He should’ve left. But the bookstore felt suddenly vast and timeless, like a moment caught between heartbeats.
He sat down.
“I don’t know your name,” he said.
“I know yours,” she replied. “Julian, ghost-whisperer who refuses to acknowledge the family gift, drinks too much Earl Grey, and mourns a mother who isn’t dead but is disappointingly alive.”
The color drained from his face. “You’re not guessing.”
“Nope.”
He reached for the paper. “Who wrote this?”
“You did.” She tapped the blank side. Words appeared.
Stay. You’ll regret it if you don’t. —Still You
“I don’t write prophecies,” he muttered.
“Not yet,” she said. “But everyone bookmarks their own story eventually.”
The cat purred. A tiny spark of lavender magic curled around Julian’s fingers.
“Have you ever met someone,” he said slowly, “and felt like the story changed the second they entered the scene?”
She smiled. “Yes. Once.”
Julian swallowed. “What happened?”
“He left before the last page.”
They sat in silence. A laugh echoed from the next aisle—someone had accidentally turned themselves into a small flock of pigeons. No one seemed alarmed.
Julian glanced at the slip again. More words appeared:
She’s the one who stays, if you ask her to. —Maybe You
“What if I don’t know how to ask?”
She handed him a pen.
“You write it.”
He stared at the pen. “This isn’t normal.”
“Neither are soul-tied bookstores, cats with cosmic vision, or men who accidentally awaken latent magic by flirting with a witch at a book signing.”
“I wasn’t flirting.”
She arched a brow.
“…Okay, maybe a little.”
She took the pen and scribbled something in his copy of her book. He peeked over the top:
Chapter 13: Love Spells That Backfire Gloriously.
“Are you trying to curse me?”
“Only if you’re lucky,” she said. Then she added, “Or brave.”
He stood, awkward. Unsure.
“Do I—do I come back?” he asked, voice low.
“That,” she said, “is entirely up to you.”
Julian hesitated, then turned to go. He made it three steps before the cat meowed—a sound that cracked open something hollow in his chest.
He turned back.
The witch was still watching. Not smiling now. Waiting.
He returned to the table. “May I… buy you tea?”
Her smile bloomed like a spell catching fire.
“I’d be enchanted.”
As they walked away, the cat leapt from the table, pawed open the Book of Binding Hearts, and turned to Chapter 14:
Today is day 86 in the hospital for me, still awaiting approval. 🙏Prayers needed–that I will be approved and get the Rehab I seriously need.
I have been editing a friends manuscript, and doing IWSG Instagram, Newsletter, and Facebook admin things while in hospital. I have also been the Sat Fellowship feedback zoom call for my Ream subscription fiction. Writing, not so much.
However, I need to and plan to attempt to write a flash fiction story for an advent calendar ASAP. I have participated in the advent for the last several years. I also need to write my October Storytime flash fiction, my Grumpy short story for Stormdance, and get back to revising and editing my series book 1 for Midlife Ghostwalker: Katje Storm.
So I have a lot of writing I need to do that I have been neglecting with this big Life Happened incident. I am better, and hope to get physically stronger with Rehab..
I’ll see ya next month, if not sooner. 🙏Prayers appreciated.
Our Twitter handle Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. Every month, we announce a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience, or story. Include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say. Sign Up HERE.
September 4 question – Since it’s back to school time, let’s talk English class. What’s a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?
I made good grades in English, but what messed me up was the “changing times”, aging, and instead of two spaces after a period it is now one. Still can’t do it has to always be fixed. Why change or fix something that was not broken?
#newletter Hey Insecure Writers,
Want to be in our newsletter?
Do you have new book release or writerly news? Tells us about your successes and your failures. Remember success comes through failure. It’s the learning process. You have to fall down a few times before you LEARN to walk. Trial and Error.
Send us your writer news. This can be new book releases, appearances on blogs, podcasts, or going out into the world to get your words out there. Share your successes in your writer business or services.
Do you have an interesting story about publishing your first book, or going to your first author conference, or maybe it’s a cute story about someone you meet and they read your book?
EMAIL us your book releases, sends us your success stories and writing news, the cute, fun, unusual and interesting tidbits about your writing life that might inspire or encourage other writers. Maybe you have an unusual writer journey to share.
Keep stories to 375 words or fewer, include a bio, and a photo if you like. To get in the next newsletter, please get information to me before the 21st of each month. We’d love to hear from you.
Images should be jpg or png, prefer 300×300 and not over 600×600. Questions email me.
Sneak peek: My series cover for Midlife Ghostwalker
Life doesn’t have to be a series of blunders, and even if it is, there is no reason you cannot turn the blunders to your advantage.
~Katje Storm
Never trust a man who says he wants to work out an agreement for your divorce over dinner, especially when he is the one doing the cooking.
I’m Katje Storm and I’m temporarily dead. Or so, my cheating soon-to-be ex-husband told me, before he murdered me.
I’m not sure how long I strolled through this dead garden of withered flowers, chipped oscillating grayish stones, and eerie morphing cherub faces, reading each headstone, searching for some arcane key CLUE, Shamus said he needed.
He brought me to this place while I was dying explaining the whole time why he did it and what he wanted. He’d shown me two unrecognizable symbols that I was to look for during my search.
I found Nada. HE told me he was doing this to activate my Ghostwalker powers, whatever those are, and that I would THANK him later.
HE said. I wouldn’t stay dead. That I had some kind of magical destiny. I had the power to resurrect myself. Was he insane or was I?
He better be right about the temporary!
If he’s wrong–HE’s screwed. Because I’m gonna be his worst nightmare. That’s not all. HE said he was a necromancer, and IF, worse comes to worst, he could bring me back from the dead.
WHAT?
That is not exactly how that works. I read urban fantasy. I watch television, it’s sad to say, a lot of television… ah, “The Walking Dead.” Who wants to be a rotting zombie eating human brains to stay alive?
Maybe necromancy explains his control issues in our marriage; you know, neat freak, bossy, obsessing over my clothes. He always has to have the last word. I can’t be dead at forty. I still have years and years ahead of me.
I’ve thought about death a lot in my lifetime, not that I was given much choice. I have seen ghosts for as long as I can remember. I used to think everyone saw them.
Unfortunately, I found out the hard way normal people don’t see ghosts. I was a cute little kid which worked to my advantage being an orphan. I lived in several foster homes over the years. Some kids never got picked.
I learned not to mention the seeing ghost part. Because, that got you sent back to the orphanage quick, or worse, temporally institutionalized.
Yeah. That happened once.
Mostly, I tried not to think about ghosts. I’d tuned them out or ignored them. Sometimes ignoring was easier said than done. Funny thing. I had not seen one ghost since I landed in the nether purgatory or whatever form of ghost nightmare this was.
That’s weird, don’t you think?
Some of the headstones in the cemetery dated back before the civil war. There were a few really large, very creepy mausoleums. Rotted vines twined around them, locking them in a cage of dead weeds, with half-mast black roses hanging their little heads here and there.
The crypts had many symbols carved into the stone that I knew due to my career and intellectual pursuits, and some I didn’t.
I recognized the protection runes and manifesting sigils, which was strange, even weird in a cemetery. I mean… What do the dead manifest?
Sudden sensation tingled over me, as if someone had just poured ice water over my head. Talk about the creepy-crawly feels. Up to this point I had no sensations at all.
“Oh look boys, it’s a brand new specter.” That gravelly male voice sounded as if his vocal cords had been shredded.
I forced myself to turn around. My jaw dropped.
Death is as strange as life.
Three deformed skeletal bodies stood before me, two with hair, one without, slinging Mardi Gras beads, wearing colorful-raggedy pirate garb, skeleton one a pirates hat, skeleton two a cowboy hat. The third… A leprechaun hat?
I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. The SANE part of my brain said scream, but the absurd won out. It’s better to laugh than cry, right?
It’s a stress reaction. “Who are you? Larry, Curly, and Mo?”
I think the slap-stick humor just pissed them off. The short, bald, roundish nightmare… I’ll call him Curly? …lunged, mouth gaping wider and wider, like a black hole, widening past human limitations.
I’m not stupid. I ran. And, then I tripped. Tall funky-hair and bouffant closed in. I think that one was Larry. A bony hand clamped onto me. I kicked. Little good that did me.
I looked up to see three yawning, toothless black masses descending on me.
Fear is a powerful motivator to tap into your dormant po-tent-iality. Especially when your innate flight factor failed to work.
I screamed.
The silence was deafening within the black void that consumed me, and then I realized, ghosts don’t sweat their fear; or I didn’t, I vibrated it; between fear and horror, I felt the power surge through me. I found it.
Absurd power.
The undulating overwhelmed me, I fought it, followed by a soul-deep thrum-rhythm, and steady whooshing sound lulling my senses, filling every atom and molecule that death had not drained.
I literally felt my hair and toenails start to grow. Micro-shoots of sensations. Fire and ice burned through my system waking every cell and igniting each atom.
I was consumed by the internal firestorm, yet I knew the intense burn was part of my soul, not my flesh, even if I did not fully understand it.
***
Cool air brushed my skin sending a chill across my body. I felt every hair, even the really faint ones on my chin. You know the ones you can’t really see without a microscope but they grow really long. I call them my cat whiskers.
I swear someone must have gorilla glued my eyelids shut.
Sounds morphed and stretched like a distant foghorn. The underwater sensation persisted, until my ears uncorked with a pop, and then everything painfully amplified.
“Welcome back to the land of the living.” The last voice I really wanted to hear, Shamus Doyle.
That’s right. My cheating soon-to-be ex-husband. I groaned, rolling into a sitting position. My body ached in ways that had nothing to do with being forty years old.
The ass-wipe had put a paralytic in my food, and then methodically explained what he needed me to do. And when he finished, he overdosed me with morphine. HE said he didn’t want my first death to be painful.
Wasn’t that so kind of him?
He cheated on me. Caught him in our bed, in our house, but still…
Perhaps I just wanted to believe there was still something between us. I thought he loved me, or at least cared deeply. For goodness sake, we still did date night, until I walked out the door.
But murder? That was a whole nother-level of betrayal. The depth of his deceptions shattered me. I swallowed to force down the knot that had risen into my throat.
My dry mouth tasted salty.
The smell of fresh cut grass, roses, and dying carnations made my stomach wobble. A hint of honeysuckle laced the air. The monochrome landscape of death, now glaring with color and life, left me feeling kind of disconnected.
The graveyard was not dead, but alive.
The decaying vines that crawled all over the mausoleums were vibrant ivy greens mixed with white, yellow, and red climbing roses. There were spots of blue bonnet, Indian paint brushes, and dandelions, typical of Texas, covering the ground.
The best part? Life was beginning not ending. The menacing cherub looking faces of stone had regained their full angelic expressions.
I couldn’t have been dead that long. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling of disconnect, like I wasn’t quite all the way back, or something was—not wrong, just off.
I scanned the area. All appeared totally normal for a graveyard.
Shamus stood over me with his blond-haired movie star looks and dancing brown eyes, that belied the manipulator and cheater inhabiting his black heart. No signs of regret on that handsome lying face. I wanted to slap the smug smile right off his face but gravity was still wrestling with my sluggish body.
“See.” He practically sang. “You’re back. You should trust me. No harm, no foul, just like I said.”
If you enjoyed this sneak peek at my up coming Midlife series–Join my Subscription Fiction (Early Access) and keep reading while I revise, expand, and finish book one. You can check it out here. https://reamstories.com/junetakey
Do you like learning and talking about the writing craft? Are you interested in short story and flash fiction? Writing short can be hard. I love short story and flash and include some tips and resources you may find helpful. I also talk about the bigger picture of the novel. Do you struggle with beginnings, middles, ends of a story? Do you struggle with plotting, scenes, or nailing the endings? I will address such topics off and on in my new writer’s tips and resource bulletin called Writers Talk.
Get my cheat sheets, along with links to their corelated Medium Articles. Such as my Villain Profile, Negative Character Arc Sheet, Finding Your Character’s Flaw Sheet, and the brainstorm sheet. Challenge The Archetype — Create Female Villains That Rock The Protagonist World! But that is not all. I have more goodies planned, plus I have a thank you bonus for joining me set to arrive the next day.
” In working with Juneta I realized things about my story that I hadn’t recognized, issues with pacing and tension, plot points that didn’t make sense..” ~Mark Ingram Vella Author of Steve Saves The World
“I kept abandoning each one and coming up with new ideas. Juneta Key held my feet to the fire, made me choose one world to work on, and helped me plot three books in that world and possibly a fourth! “ ~Megan Stewart Fantasy Author of Where Are My Pants?
This website uses cookies with the sole intent to improve your experience as is common with most websites. If you continue to use this website we will take that as your consent. OKRejectRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
