New to this forum, but not to writing. My name is Beth and I've been writing both fanfiction and original stories since May of 1985. I have done five years of NaNoWriMo with three years of them being victories for me, last year I managed to get over 61k within ten days with three stories combined.

I found this site from Literary Rambles, a young woman by the name of Maria Zannini, posted a comment in their latest blog about Beta Readers and I followed her here. I liked what I saw in the message on the front page and joined. :)

I tend to write in my fanfiction stories about real life happenings to fictional characters from books and movies. But for my original stories, I tend to go for a romance twist on things, especially with vampires, none of this sparkling in sunlight stuff, but we get to see the politics behind attacks on women or men in my manuscript The Storyteller's tale. And a twist with the myth of Medusa, we get to see her side of things before her death at the hands of Perseus.

I am thrilled to be here and I hope I can meet new writing friends and get help when Ms. Writer's Block decides to chase my Muse away or just to talk about writing in general.

Beth F Brownell

I'm glad you like the front page message, pretty sure you'll like the rest of the site too.

You might have noticed that out of respect for other author's copyright we don't discuss fanfiction, although we do recognise that others indulge and it is a way of learning writing skills and techniques. Since we are geared to working towards publication we focus on our own stories and characters.

That said, I'm sure you'll find plenty to talk about and plent to share you're discovery of writings with.

The other aspect of Forward Motion you might have notices is that we are going through a massive clean up. We've been around for 10 years and the forums and posts are getting unwieldy and messy. So we're in the process of cleaning up and tidying up. That means you might find forums full one day and empty the next.

Don't fret, we're still as active as we normally are, just loosing some excess baggage.

So come in, have a good look around and join in a few conversations.

Oh, and look in on our chat rooms, a lot of us are there most days.

Cat

I totally understand about fanfiction. There are a lot of authors who don't like their characters to be used in that way. It was what started me writing, I tend to write more original stories these days than fanfiction.

One of my own original stories came from a fanfiction story that I did. I liked the plot that I did on that fanfiction story, that I moved the plot over to become an original story itself. Which I have written over 61k with that original story and it is one of my favorite stories that I'm working on to date.

Beth

Hi Beth! :wave: Welcome to FM!

This is a great place to talk about writing. I'm glad you've joined us!

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

What forums should I seriously look into getting into instead of focusing on one forum?

I am into romance and the paranormal fantasy type stories.

*heading back to the grindstone of my story, before the Muse decides to fly away.*

Beth

It does depend on what you want to achieve.

Roving Crits will allow you to get comments on your stories, or chapters. You can ask specific questions like 'Does Jane's reaction to Dick's throwing the ball at her seem realistic?'

Or you could post and let critters make the comments as they wish to.

Under Genre Discussions we have areas where you can post questions or points of intereste with respect to that genre. There is a board for Romance and one for Fatanasy. Paranormal (my prefered genre) fits many genres - horror, fantasy, romance - so post under an appropriate genre.

Skills and Techniques is about writing skills in general. Or there are many motivational boards.

What do you wish to work on with respect to your writing?

I was always told that I was too wordy and I left scenes out that should be there in the story and that the characters should be more defined and such.

My Muses usually runs off at the worst moment possible, as she ran off at the third week of NaNoWriMo 2011, but thankfully, I had enough word count to have past the 50k mark.

And I love to talk to other writers to get inspired and to inspire them if at all possible.

I am really interested in getting my stories published. I have had bad luck in getting a con artist of an agent who ran off with my money and gave me nothing in return but false hopes and dashed my dreams. My entire family got conned by him but this happened in 1996 and I should have done an internet search on him to find out if he was real till after he had ran off with my money and some of my father's money and took a year away from my own search for a good agent and I learned that he was not a real one but a scammer who preyed on new writers.

Beth

Based on what you've said I would suggest;

Roving Crits - to get some comments ona chapter or two - http://www.fmwriters.com/community/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=38

The Novel Club - A novel swapping group - http://www.fmwriters.com/community/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=36&topic_id=858&mesg_id=858&page=

Daily Page and Word Count - http://www.fmwriters.com/community/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=29

And chat - http://fmwriters.com/forum_chat/index.php

Should be enough to get you started

Thank you for the suggestions.

Beth

I tend to just use Read New, and see what strikes my fancy. After you're done, click on Mark, and that will mark everything as read. (Reading a thread doesn't mark it as read, on my computer at least.)

Have fun!