#IWSG September 2025: End of Summer Update

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 September 3 posting of the IWSG are Kim Lajevardi, Natalie Aguirre, Nancy Gideon, and Diedre Knight!

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

Link | IWSG Blog Hop Participants 

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September 3 question - What are your thoughts on using AI, such as GPChat, Raptor, and others with your writing? Would you use it for research, story bible, or creating outlines/beats?

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Hello, friends!

It's been a while. I missed the August post, although I don't quite remember why. I think it being later in the month threw me off and by the time I remembered it felt too late in the day to write the post. But I'm here now! This is going to end up being an end of summer update because I missed last month.

July and August turned out to be extremely busy months for me. I had to have a lot of unexpected dental work done (the phrase root canal was thrown around but thankfully they didn't have to do that) and then had a couple weeks of my day job at the end of August where I was working 10-hour days to try to get a project done before I left for Dragon Con at the end of the month. And while I did work long days and did have a few nights of about 3-4 hours of sleep getting packed to leave, I got everything completed before I left. But it made for a crazy busy, stressful month. I did not do a lot of writing-related things, aside from brush up a couple short stories and send them out to submission calls.

Speaking of, I do have some news! I can't share exactly who or when or where, but I did receive something short story acceptance shaped in my inbox on August 13th! I couldn't believe it, and still re-read the email to make sure I didn't hallucinate it. But I got my first ever little front page Congratulations on Submission Grinder and cannot wait for this final product. It's going to be really cool to get paid for my words. While I've been paid for words before as a ghostwriter, they weren't mine in the sense that I can't claim them and no one knows I wrote them. I'll share more on this as soon as I can!

Of course, along with that acceptance came a few devastating rejections. Some on short stories I was really hopeful for, one of which felt like a personalized rejection strongly urging me to submit to other submission calls with that press, and others on my book that's still toiling away on submission. A couple of those were with publishers I'd felt strongly about and made me pretty sad. This summer has been hard on me emotionally when it comes to writing and I've let the sadness build up and affect my productivity. But I'm hoping to snap out of that soon. I need to get my sports romance edited so we can take it on submission next.

Being at Dragon Con this last week has definitely gotten me reinvigorated. If you don't know what Dragon Con is, it's like those other big cons you see--New York Comic Con (NYCC) or San Diego Comic Con (SDCC)--where thousands of people show up for the weekend. And I mean tens of thousands (even over a hundred thousand at NYCC and SDCC). Dragon Con takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, over Labor Day weekend and draws around 80,000 people. I haven't seen an official count for this year yet, but last year was just over 70k, the biggest number since the pre-Covid 2019 record-breaking 85k. To me, this year didn't feel as crowded, but I was also super overwhelmed last year as my first year attending, so maybe I was just better prepared this year.

This year, I was a volunteer for the Writers' Track, and we had some stellar guests. Some of the bigger names in attendance included T. Kingfisher (who was also the Literary Guest of Honor), Jim Butcher and his son James J. Butcher, Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, Mary Robinette Kowal, Matt Dinniman, Jonathan Maberry, and Sherrilyn Kenyon--to name a few.

I'll probably do a full Dragon Con wrap-up blog in the coming weeks, if I can find the time, but being around career authors is always such an inspiration. There's so much amazing advice flying around and so many connections being made it's hard to keep up!

A couple highlights of the Con included:

Moderating a panel on Working with Editors and Professional Readers. This panel included Gini Koch, Steve Saffel, Chris A. Jackson, AJ Hartley and Mary Robinette Kowal. I had a few heart palpitations when I saw Kowal was on the panel I was moderating. She's such an amazing human, and I made sure to get a picture!

I moderated this same panel at Multiverse Con last year, and I swear this could be a three-hour workshop, because we didn't even get through half of my questions. The panelists had so much great insight into working with editors, and we only covered a few things!

My second highlight was definitely getting a chance to meet Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse books (that became the True Blood HBO series) and were such a huge inspiration to me when I first started out writing contemporary fantasy. While I was unable to get a picture with her, I did get her to sign my copy of Dead Until Dark.

She was just hilarious and delightful, and I'm so glad I got this opportunity to meet one of my idols.

There are so many other things that I could talk about happening at Dragon Con, but I'll save those for my official Dragon Con post, that I hope I can actually find time to write, and soon before I forget everything. But it was an amazing week getting to hang out with old friends and make new ones. I spent a significant amount of time with author Bob McGough and GoIndieNow host Joe Compton, who kidnapped my partner and me for dinner one night, and I spoke to Matt Dinniman on a couple occasions. The amount of Dungeon Crawler Carl cosplays was wild. We met Dinniman a couple years ago at a smaller con when he was right on the cusp of blowing up, so it's been fun to watch this evolution of his series over the years.

But that's enough on Dragon Con for now! I'll segue into my next big announcement.

I have taken over as a Co-Director for the WRITE Track at Multiverse Con, which happens October 17-19 in Peachtree City, GA, just south of Atlanta. My fellow co-director is Kyoko M. and we're so looking forward to welcoming writers to Multiverse. There's still time to decide to join us there, and there will be day passes at the door if you're local to the area and can't make the whole Con, although we'd love to have you there for all of it! I am excited, and a little nervous, to be stepping into this role, but this is exactly the kind of thing I love to do. Come join us!

What's next for me? In a few weeks I'll be heading back to Atlanta for the Georgia Romance Writers Moonlight & Magnolias conference.

My sports romance, A Bid on Love, is a finalist in the Georgia Romance Writers Prepublished Maggie Award for Excellence in the contemporary romance category.

I used this as an excuse to decide last minute to attend this conference that I've been eyeing for years. I may not win in my category, but it will be nice to spend a few days hanging out with other romance writers, making connections, and to be acknowledged as a finalist for this award along with some other stellar writers.

Anyone going to be in attendance with me there?

September Question

Today's question asks: - What are your thoughts on using AI, such as GPChat, Raptor, and others with your writing? Would you use it for research, story bible, or creating outlines/beats?

Honestly, I am exhausted by the topic of AI, so I will keep my thoughts brief.

In my day job, it is all the rage, and while I do use it sometimes for day job things, because I'm expected to be able to know how to prompt it correctly to stay relevant in my field, I have reservations about the environmental impact using it in that capacity.

I absolutely, firmly believe that GenAI has no place in the creative process. In the early days, which really wasn't that long ago, I was a little more on the fence about using it for brainstorming. But many of my friends have been impacted by the entire Meta debacle with AI stealing their work to train the machine, and I can't even consider using it at this point, knowing that anything it spits out was unethically trained by the hard work of others being unlawfully and unethically used.

If I use any AI, it is purely in a closed loop, analytical capacity where I know how it has been trained. and never in a generative "creative" capacity.

Anyone reading my work can be sure that it was purely human created. And that's all I have to say about that.

Thanks for stopping by!

Let me know in the comments how your summer has been, if you've ever been to a writing conference in any capacity, and what you're working on or your thoughts on this month's question.

Looking forward to traversing the blog hop.

Be sure to see my links for other places to keep up with me online and sign-up for my newsletter! I promise I won't spam you. I don't even have an onboarding auto-welcome post set up yet, but I am working on getting that going sometime before the end of the year.

For now,

Rosie J.

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