IWSG February 2026: Revisiting old writing

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! Let’s rock the neurotic writing world! Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the February 4 posting of the IWSG are J Lenni Dorner, Victoria Marie Lees, and Sandra Cox!

The following link will allow you to peruse everyone in the Blog Hop.

Link | IWSG Blog Hop Participants 

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February 4 question - Many writers have written about the experience of rereading their work years later. Have you reread any of your early works? What was that experience like for you?

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Hello, friends!

I hope we've all survived the first month of 2026. It's been very cold in Tennessee. We were in the single digits (Fahrenheit) for most of a week, got like eight inches of snow, and it's hung around because it's stayed so cold. We were supposed to go to a concert in Knoxville for my birthday weekend on the 24th, and it got cancelled. Off to a great start!

The snow was pretty at least, especially with the full moon the other night. but I am now officially over the winter, which had been relatively mild up until we all got a Free Trial of living in Alaska.

My free trial is over and I would like to cancel my subscription please. I am not cut out for sustained subzero temperatures.

I can see how people get used to the cold though. I went outside yesterday, with it near 40F, to try to clean off the stairs some. I was in shorts and a tank top and was not cold. Of course, I only stayed outside for about 10-15 minutes while I squeegeed (yes squeegeed, it worked really well) off the steps, but it felt like a heat wave after the last two weeks!

Writing stuff has been kind of uneventful this month after my big announcement last month. I'm still waiting on my line edits to come back from my publisher (which should be next week), so nothing much new on the book front. I have noticed it has populated on a few websites for sale, but we're not officially launching pre-orders yet or anything.

The most exciting thing was that I got a line art preview of my cover. AND IT'S GOING TO BE AMAZING. The cover illustrator is awesome, and I cannot wait to see the full color version. If this book doesn't catch someone's eye on a shelf, then I don't know what it will take because the cover is just that good. I can't wait to show the world!

I'm also working on some short speculative projects right now. One is cryptid related and it's a lot of fun. I got invited to contribute framework for a short TTRPG one-off adventure in someone else's world. I also have a horror novelette I'm working on for another press. So that's fun!

Otherwise, it's been a chill month in the writing sphere. I've booked four editing clients and will be getting my first manuscript soon! I'm so excited to officially get started as a dev editor!

Link || Author Services 

Multiverse Con in Peachtree City, Georgia

As some of you all may know, I'm co-director for the WRITE track at Multiverse Con. If you're a published author, gamer/game-designer, artist, horror/scifi/fantasy superfan of some sort, check out Multiverse and consider applying as a Guest for our 2026 Con in October!

Applications are open until the end of March. Feel free to ask me any questions you might have.

Even if you don't apply to be a guest, consider attending. It's going to be a great show this year.

Martha Wells (yes, Murderbot) is one of our Guests of Honor! I'm so stoked.

Link || Multiverse Con Homepage

February Question

Today's question asks: - Many writers have written about the experience of rereading their work years later. Have you reread any of your early works? What was that experience like for you

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I have two old manuscripts that live rent-free in my brain that I want to rewrite one day, so I revisit them regularly. One is a spy thriller the other is an urban fantasy. I wrote the spy thriller in 2011-2012 and the UF in 2013-2014. There's a huge difference in my writing just between those two years. In structure and in prose, although the UF was way more put together as a cohesive story than the thriller.

In retrospect, I've realized the thriller is really two books, maybe three, but definitely should be told chronologically as a duology at the very least. As it stands it's about 90k words that go back and forth between the present day and an old mission. I probably wrote it that way because it was my first novel I'd really written as an adult, and I'm heavily influenced by visual media. Movies can handle flashbacks and non-linear storytelling a lot better than written word can. I think you have to have such a strong understanding of the craft to pull off non-linear in the written word. I definitely didn't have that in 2011 as a baby writer. I might not even now.

I sometimes go into those works looking for excerpts for the #WIPSnips daily share prompt I host on Bluesky. Sometimes I don't even want to share from it, or have to heavily rewrite it first, because my line level craft has changed so much in over a decade. Writing is one of those things you can truly improve at just be doing it over and over and studying the craft in-between drafts. Learning how to self-edit has been one of my biggest boons for improving my craft, because a lot of those things I have to edit out, I know to look for now when I'm drafting the first time. Line level issues that riddle my older first drafts. I know when I do get around to rewriting these, I might keep some of the scenarios, but very little of the original prose will make it into the new draft, just because my writing and voice has changed so much.

Now, if we want to get really wild, I possess a copy of a sci-fi book I wrote when I was around 10-12 years old. I printed it off and illustrated it and everything! That one is just fun to look back at and read. It's hilarious now, but in the eyes of a ten year old was the best thing in the world. It's full of nostalgia (Backstreet Boys references anyone?) and it's a delight to look back and see that I've always been writing and have that proof of me as a true baby writer.

I always like to share these stories with people who are just starting out on their writing journeys as adults and writing their first drafts. We all have to start somewhere. It took me since my first completed manuscript as an adult in 2012 until 2025 to write something that was good enough to be picked up by a publisher. Of course, it's different for everyone and some people get that success with their first book, but for me, it was my fifth full manuscript, with countless others that have never been finished. Part of what changed was that I figured out how to edit, so the project didn't just sit there in first draft status forever.

Finding your process is really the key.

Thanks for stopping by!

Let me know about your old writings in the comments.

Looking forward to traversing the blog hop and reading about other people's experiences with their old writing.

For now,

Rosie J.

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