Look at me!

Hey, I have a blog!

I've never seen the appeal of having an everyday blog. Maybe for a minute or two I'll think that sounds like fun, and then come to my senses. I guess my life's just not interesting enough for that. ;)

This won't be an everyday how-was-my-day-at-work, how-is-my-family blog. I've decided to create a blog specifically to chronicle and keep track of my writing and my attempts to get it published. I don't know if that will be of any interest to anybody, and if nobody else cares, well that's okay. But lately as I've been churning out material I've been wishing I had a way to record how I feel about the process, and about what I'm doing. A place to keep track of my progress, word counts, mood, meta-observations, etc.

Over the years, I've written dozens of short stories, begun several novels, completed one novel, and I'm currently well into another novel. I won a contest once, but other than that, none of my fiction has ever been published. I (now) think a lot of my earlier, unpublished stuff is dreadful--certainly including my first full novel. But I've learned a lot through those false starts, so I'm not ashamed of them. My only regret, I guess, is not writing faster, not writing more. I'm 35--nearly 36--and still basically trying to get started. (But my rant on the "Fallback Career" advice hopeful artists get is for another post on another day.)

Some of the stories I have not found a home for I think are actually publishable. I have an unfortunate tendency to stop shopping things around before I've exhausted all of my possibilities. I try not to run afoul of multiple submission restrictions, and it takes so freaking long to hear back from people that sometimes I just stop following up. This is especially likely when I don't hear back from a market at all, which happens all too often. This happened to my first novel, when an agent asked to see it after my proposal but never got back to me, and to my best short story. I don't plan to go back to submitting that first novel. I've come to realize that it's not very good, and it's better to chalk that one up to a learning experience and move on, but I really should start trying to push that story again. I guess I'm posting about it here to put a little pressure on myself to get on that.

You know, if (when!) I get my writing sold, hopefully this blog will make a nice record of the process.

Anyway, I guess I'll wait until another post to talk about my current project and stuff. This seems like a lengthy enough introduction.