My Blogging Community - Guest Post!

Debra H. Goldstein, award-winning author

I'm thrilled to welcome you to a guest post by Debra H. Goldstein, an award-winning author with short stories, standalones, and mystery series to her credit. Since launching her writing career, Debra has worked with writing groups that are organized around blogs. While each group offers its unique benefits, all have helped her develop in her craft and sustained her along her prolific and successful writing journey. Learn about these specialized writing groups below, visit Debra and learn about her books on her author site, and follow her on Instagram @debrahgoldstein.

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Authors are often described as individuals who isolate themselves in a room, coffee shop, or library communing only with their computers. Although that description is partially true, for me, being a member of three very different styled blogging groups has provided consistent interaction and support during the decade that I’ve been seriously writing.

Writers Who Kill  is comprised of twenty-two crime fiction writers. Each is assigned a specific blogging day during the month (I’m the third Monday). Although this schedule would seem to preclude interaction, we participate in peer review which means we circulate our proposed pieces to everyone in advance of publication for comments and edits. Whether the suggestions address comma errors, confusing sentences, or missing words, our published pieces are improved, we learn from the exercise, and our communication has enabled us to learn about each other behind the scenes. We also try to post a relevant and often personal comment on every published blog.

The first time any of us see or comment on a Stiletto Gang post from any of the group’s fourteen romance, crime fiction, or other genre authors is the day it is published. Because of our varied backgrounds and interests, our blogs are equally diverse, as is the audience we reach. There is a good camaraderie behind the scenes, but unlike Writers Who Kill, it is more unlikely we’ll pass at live events unless we schedule a book signing that allows us to intermingle our different audiences.

My third blog group, Booklover’s Bench, is a lifeboat support group of seven cozy writers, which means we are there for each other from sharing things in our lives, to helping with our books by holding joint Facebook parties and events, working on blurbs for each other, or presenting as a group at conferences. In terms of the mechanics of the blog itself, we don’t do peer review but we each leave comments when a Let’s Talk post goes up on Thursdays and have specific assignments to fulfill our mission that readers are winners. These tasks include handling our monthly raffle, doing website posts, creating our monthly word search and jigsaw puzzle pieces, circulating PR when a new post appears, and gathering our weekly statistics. The emphasis on our internal support system is what makes this blogging experience more unique and personal.

Being in these three different groups, as well as having my own blog, It’s Not Always a Mystery on which I feature guest authors, has given me the opportunity to introduce my works and me as an author to readers whom I would never encounter. More importantly, because my writing career has seen its share of ups and downs – including being orphaned twice, I’ve had a network of people celebrating or consoling me. Blogging takes time and is probably not as productive as it once was, but I wouldn’t trade the relationships it has fostered for anything.

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Judge Debra H. Goldstein is the author of With Our Bellies Full and the Fire Dying, a collection of her short stories, as well as Kensington’s Sarah Blair mystery series, and two standalones: IPPY award winning Maze in Blue and Should Have Played Poker: a Carrie Martin and the Mah Jongg Players Mystery. Her writings have won Silver Falchion, IPPY, AWC, and BWR awards, and been named Agatha, Anthony, and Derringer finalists. Debra serves on the national board of Sisters in Crime and previously was on the Mystery Writers Association national board and president of the Guppies and SEMWA.

Debra's new book, With Our Bellies Full and the Fire Dying, is a collection of eighteen of her award-winning stories that deal with family and friends, their sins, and their sometimes redemption.