Clara D Munro

Tag: blog

  • Writing Vlog Weeks 5-10

    Writing Vlog Weeks 5-10

  • Writer’s Vlog – Life and Writing – Week Four

    Writer’s Vlog – Life and Writing – Week Four

    Week Four of writing my next book – Project Autumn Winds – Sept 27, 2025

    Open Beta Read Shadow Fox on Wattpad here: https://www.wattpad.com/story/398258333-shadow-fox

    Socials:
    https://www.instagram.com/claradmunro/
    Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/claradmunro

  • Writer’s Vlog – Life and Writing – Week Three

    Writer’s Vlog – Life and Writing – Week Three

    Week Three of writing my next book – Project Autumn Winds – Sept 20, 2025

    Challenges
Publishing journey for Shadow Fox
Little bits about my life

    Canadian ISBN registry – https://www.canada.ca/en/library-archives.html

    Open Beta Read Shadow Fox on Wattpad here: https://www.wattpad.com/story/398258333-shadow-fox

    Socials:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/claradmunro/
    Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/claradmunro

  • Writer’s Vlog – Life and Writing – Week Two

    Writer’s Vlog – Life and Writing – Week Two

    Week Two of writing my next book – Project Autumn Winds

    Challenges
Publishing journey for Shadow Fox
Little bits about my life

    Open Beta Read Shadow Fox on Wattpad here: https://www.wattpad.com/story/398258333-shadow-fox

    Socials:
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/claradmunro/
    Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/claradmunro

  • Shadow Fox Beta is Live

    Shadow Fox Beta is Live

    You can read the first three chapters up on Wattpad right now! It’s free to read and you can read it on the Wattpad app or website.

    https://www.wattpad.com/1560844083-shadow-fox-prologue

    I will add more chapters every week and I encourage you to read them, commend, and make any suggestions. Be brutal and honest – you will not hurt me if you do but I trust all readers will be doing so with the best possible intentions.

    If you find that you just don’t like it and the type of story isn’t your cup of tea – I respect that. Not everyone enjoys the fantasy genre.

    I hope that you enjoy it though!

    Clara D. Munro

  • Writing Begins on Project: Autumn Winds

    Writing Begins on Project: Autumn Winds

    Autumn Winds is ready to start the drafting process. I have an action plan for this book and I am taking all the lessons I learned writing Shadow Fox and applying them to my new book.

    First: This books is going to be 120,000 words – 60 chapters – 2000 words per chapter (give or take). This book will be in three parts – 20 chapters per part and each part will take place in a different part of the Embersong Forest.

    Second: I am going to only write five days out of the week which means that it will take about three months to complete the rough draft. That means that I will be working on a different part of the book each month.

    I would like the first draft to be done by the end of November. The goal is to write about the season of Autumn during the time in which it is happening.

    Lastly, for this book I will be starting a vlog series for it. At the end of each week I will record a little video about how the process is going along with some nice B roll of what the Autumn looks like in my corner of the world. I will post the vlogs on YouTube but also share them here. This means I will be not doing written blog posts about the process this time. Vlogs will be posted every Saturday.

    I am going to work on this project first because the second book in the Shadow Fox series needs more time to cook in regards of direction and plot. It has a lot of moving parts and characters in it.

    Meanwhile – the first chapter of Shadow Fox will be going up on Wattpad Friday, September 5. I will post one chapter at a time to allow me time to implement any updates as I go. New chapters will go up every Friday. Once all the chapters are up – I will leave the book up for about three months before I start making movement towards hard copy and ebook publishing.

    That’s a lot of updates and I know it. I hope that you will all join me on this next part of my writing journey and if any of it inspired you to start you own creative projects, let me know in the comments.

  • Summer’s End

    Summer’s End

    It’s been a busy and exciting summer of camping and adventures. I drove many kilometers this summer while going the Vancouver Island a couple of times and to Alberta for a Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids Summer Camp. I had many nights of sitting around camp fires laughing and enjoying the company of my fellow pagans.

    I managed to finish up the 2nd draft of Shadow Fox and it’s currently being read over by a few trusted friends. I am just about ready to take the feedback they have given me and move the book into the next phase – open Beta on Wattpad. From there, I will open it up to anyone who wants to read it. They can leave comments right in the text for everyone to see. After it’s been up there for a while, I will take the suggested edits that I agree with and then start the process of querying a literary agent. I’ll be also getting it ready for self-publishing with Ingramspark. Should I decided that traditional publishing isn’t for me, then I will be ready for that.

    Meanwhile, I have started the planning phase for not one but two new books. First is the follow up book to Shadow Fox and the second is a new cozy autumn inspired book set in the same world as Shadow Fox but at a different time.

    As the summer comes to its close over the next couple of weeks, I will be getting myself focused on my dark part of the year writing routine. I’ve recently gotten my evening reading routine back into place and I have started journaling again. There’s still a few more events that I am attending in September and October but I might as well get started on my routine since books do not write themselves.

  • Be who you want to be

    Be who you want to be

    For a while there, I was putting “Aspiring” in front of Writer because I didn’t believe that I could call myself a “Writer” until I had published a book. I had this core belief that only the very special get to have the title of “Writer”. That only those people who managed get their book published were worthy of being called “Writers”. Fuck that core belief.

    Aspiring Writer – that looks better, doesn’t it?

    I have completed writing a fantasy novel that is over 100K in words and 450 pages long. Is it worthy of awards? No, but I didn’t write it for recognition. Even if this book never sees the inside of my local bookshop, I still wrote it.

    Having a good group of supportive people in your life makes a difference. I have a core group that has been supportive of me the whole way through. They are the ones who will I have asked for help in the reviewing of the book before I decided if I am going to seek an Agent and publisher or if I will self publish or online publish.

    There will also be silent friends and family. The ones who say nothing at all. They don’t support you and they don’t show up when it counts. At that point, maybe it’s time to ask yourself if those people even noticed that you were doing something or worse, that they just don’t care. I wouldn’t say go and confront them – trust me, that will not make you or them feel any better. I would advise that you just keep moving forward, keep writing, and keep being creative. If they show up at the finish line later on and want to congratulate you then – just thank them and move on. If they never show up again – just remember the fond memories and leave them in your past. Chances are that they are caught up in their own story. Don’t dwell on the fact that you’re not in their story – focus on being the main character in your own story.

    Lastly, if anyone tells you that you not allowed to call yourself a writer – tell them to go fuck themselves. That person is a bully and wants to hurt you and cut you down. Fuck people like that.

  • The Importance of the “Day Job”

    The Importance of the “Day Job”

    Don’t quit your day job – not in the mean way older generations like to use this phrase to squash our ability to create but by making sure you keep the lights on so that you can be creative.

    I could not have written my book if I didn’t have my day job. That’s a fact. Not that the job helped to write the book but it did give me the financial security to pursue my dream of being an author.

    The fact of the matter is, we all have bills to pay. We have credit cards, loans, home expenses, and other things that pop up to surprise us. Gods forbid that you have a medical emergency or other such things occur.

    If you think that you need to quit your job in order to write a book, you are very much mistaken. Look at every other writer that came before you in the last sixty to seventy years – everyone of them will tell the tale of needing to carve out time to write between shifts and likely also tending to their families.

    Someone once pointed out to me that I had the perfect conditions for being able to write. I had a steady job, no children to mind, and no major responsibilities. He called it being in the ultimate flow state and that the only thing stopping me was me. While I hated how he put it at the time, he was right.

    You need to find your own state of flow. Find the time that works for you to write. You might need to make shifts to your routine in order to make it happen. I can tell you this, if you do not make it a priority in your life, then you will not be able to write. Energy flows to where energy goes – which means, that which you put your energy into, that’s where your energy will go.

    So if you spend all your free time watching Tictok videos or Instagram Reels, then that’s where all of your time and energy are going to disappear into. Social media has been designed to keep you locked into their platforms and they are black holes that your life will disappear into.

    If you want to see where your time is being spent – spend just one week recording everything you do from the moment you wake up to when you shut off the lights to sleep. Note how long you spend on each action. This is a sobering experiment and one that will likely make you want to change your habits pretty fast. After the week is done, look at all those times when you allowed yourself to just dissociated into the your devices and see if maybe you could try something else.

    If your addiction is really bad – use the digital health apps that are built into your device to help you limit the time you use social media apps. Or better yet, uninstall the apps for a month. You might find that you never want to go back.

    One final note – if you are not currently working or going to school, don’t have children to mind, or any other major responsibilities and you are not writing or being creative with your time – ask yourself – why and what is stopping you? You’re probably not going to like your answer and that’s good. Use that to motivate you.

    Your time is the most valuable thing you have. Do not let something else monopolize it.

  • Publishing Options

    Publishing Options

    I am at the stage where I can start considering which option I want to go with for publishing Shadow Fox and the books that will be in the World of Tierra series to come.

    1. Traditional publishing through a literary agent
    2. Self-publishing through IngramSpark
    3. Online Publishing with Wattpad

    Traditional publishing is by far the hardest of the three option. It’s a lot of work for very much little to no pay off. It’s a competitive market out there since writing has never been easier to accomplish. Between the use of AI and advance word-processing programs – anyone who puts in the time can write a book. I am not sure that I have the energy to do what it takes to woo a literary agent. I haven’t even come up with a list of agents that I even want to try asking.

    Self publishing appears to be the smarter choice for someone just starting out without a long history of other publications behind them. I have been seriously considering IngramSpark for my books because they take care of everything and all I need to do is upload it and then do my own marketing.

    Online Publishing is by far the easiest of the three. I have used Wattpad in the past and it’s easy to upload, make edits, and then remove if you no longer want it on that platform. What I may do to start with is upload the books onto there first. Let it get views and comments on there and then use that final bit of feedback to make the ultimate final draft and then use IngramSpark to publish it once and for all.

    The reality of our world is most people read on their phones these days. Whether we like it or not, our smart devices are part of our everyday life now. The average person spends between 4-5 hours on their device a day. I know that I read a lot on my phone. I choose to read on it rather than scroll endlessly on social media apps. If I choose to online publish first and then move to IngramSpark to both get my books up on shops like Kindle and Kobo and also physical bookstores like Indigo Chapters and Coles here in Canada, then I will have checked off every way in which someone can access the books.

    I have said it before, I am not in this for money – I am writing because I enjoy it. If someone else likes my writing, that’s awesome and if they don’t – let’s hope they aren’t mean about it. If somewhere down the road I feel comfortable reaching out to a literary agent or one reaches out to me, I can cross that bridge when I get to it.

    Fun fact that I learned this week – Canadians get ISBN numbers for free from the Canadian government! All you need to do is apply for one. You need one for each type of publication too. It’s one of the few places in the world that the government helps to facilitate creators.