A Podcast, a Prize, a Setback, a Review and a Pivot

Ford Knows Books will be taking Winter Hours for the month of December with just two posts: The Books We ❤️ Club on Dec 15th with a review of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room by , and The Road to Published on Dec 29th*. Happy Holidays!

Correction: The Road to Published post will appear on 12/29, rather than 12/20 as originally stated.Talk Fiction Podcast

If you haven’t had a chance to listen to my podcast episode on Talk Fiction with of the Beautiful, Daring, Stupid newsletter, click the ▶ Listen now link below.

Meg’s as funny as she is fabulous, and knows how to put a guest at ease. We talked about author platforms, social media, authenticity, and navigating the exhausting publication journey from both directions—me as a self-published author, and Meg as the Watty Award-winning AND now small press-published author of See Dot Smile, coming in 2026 from ’ Empress Editions.

Beautiful, Daring, Stupid 12 | The Cult of AuthenticityWelcome back to Talk Fiction, the podcast dedicated to entertainment media’s most overlooked underdogs: Fiction writers… Listen now4 days ago · 14 likes · 10 comments · Meg Oolders and Mr. Troy FordSamuel Richardson Prize

And if you are as excited as I am about ’s inaugural Samuel Richardson Prize, you will know that four of the finalists have so far been named:

Naomi’s pick - Drive A by Merritt Graves - REVIEW

’s pick - Cubafruit by - REVIEW

’s pick - Glitterballs by Michele Howarth - REVIEW

’s pick - Here, The Bees Sting by Will Caverly of - REVIEW

I’ve grabbed all four for reading over the holidays.

Six other judges have not yet announced their finalist pick, so there’s still hope for Lamb. Click to read more about the Samuel Richardson Prize.

The Setback

I’ve mentioned before that in early October I came down with shingles, that Easter egg of maturity your parents don’t mention when your sister comes down with the chickenpox and they suggest building a blanket fort complete with flash lights, ghost stories, and hot cocoa to speed contagion along.

Spain has a rather different approach to vaccinations than the U.S., though I wouldn’t trust American doctors to be especially more proactive about it. Here you have to beg a doctor for a prescription, get it filled at a farmacia, and then hand-carry it yourself to a clinic for the injection. 😑

Guidance suggests that anyone aged 50 or above get a shingles vaccine, though since my diagnosis I have heard of much younger people getting it, as well as some horror stories of shingles on the face and around eyes and ears that make the patch on my chest and side seem blessedly manageable.

Still, once the rash and flu-like symptoms abated, the lingering combination of numbness, itching, irritation, and outright stabbing pain from the nerve damage has been vexing enough that my original schedule for drafting the follow-up novel to Lamb has been seriously undermined.

I must now admit that perhaps putting “1000 WORDS” on my actual Google calendar as a daily Monday thru Friday task from the beginning of August to the middle of October (50 work days = 50,000 words, oy!) might have had something to do with my outbreak.

Things actually got off to a good start. I stuck to my schedule through mid-September and clocked 27K words before I hit that “muddy middle” and realized I needed to clarify some ideas before continuing—you can read more about that in the September edition.

I admit I lost some momentum. Both my previously completed novels were accomplished through “pantsing” (writing by the seat of your pants versus “plotting” with an outline and other guidelines set before drafting) and this new one was humming along similarly up to the halfway mark.

The Snowflake Method helped me get some things straight in my head, and I even reset the “1000 WORDS” counter to a new deadline 23 working days out (mid/end Novemberish) when Mr. Shingles swooped in and waylaid me.

In the last seven weeks, I’ve managed to get to 33K words, so I’ve got about 17K words to reach my target of 50K, the minimum word count to be considered a novel.

Of course, the story takes up however many words it needs; undoubtedly, this one will expand and contract through rewrites and editing. I will never be a 600-page novelist—I’m a chronic under-writer—and besides, I think many books are too long.

Short Review

I just finished A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and 615 pages. I found it on our building’s impromptu Little Free Book Library shelf, which is mostly Spanish books.

In blurb, it was right in my wheelhouse: squarely bookended at the end of the 19th century by the English Arts and Crafts movement, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the later Bloomsberries, it tells the story of the extended Wellwood family and their group of friends with artistic, anarchist, and socialist leanings.

But its length was bloated at least 20% by extended summarizations of real historic movements and events which, though interesting, had little bearing on the meandering plot.

While I love a good family saga—and this one had some great characters and touching moments—it was far longer than it needed to be.

But that cover! 🤩

A Pivot

In any event, I had a good long talk with my Imaginary Mentor last week, and we came to the conclusion that “1000 WORDS” as a daily task was probably the formula for stress-related illness, and I promptly deleted it from my calendar.

Instead, I’m returning to my 10 minutes a day goal, which I talked about more in one of my very earliest posts below, along with two other tried-and-true strategies for busting through writer’s block.

Just sitting down to write for 10 minutes—a conversation, a description, a rumination, some small snippet of the story—and I will almost always end up writing more. The very act of starting produces connections and what-nexts that carry you along, and before you know it, you’ve written 800 words without even thinking about it.

10 minutes is the deal, and that’s all you have to do—set a timer—you can hit the snooze button and write for another 10 minutes (and another and another) if you’re on a roll, or just get up and walk away.

If I keep this up, I hope to be 80-90% finished with the rough draft by the end of December, and that’s 100% fine by me.

In the interests of holiday travel and merry-making, I’ll leave it there.

I am excited to share more about this second and the planned third book in the Lamb universe, and I’ll be dedicating December’s issue of The Road to Published to a sneak peak of those forthcoming efforts.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a very Happy Thanksgiving. I know I am grateful for many things, including all of you. 💚💛🧡🤎 MTF