It's not goodbye . . .

Way back on March 14th of 2008, I set out to document my renewed commitment to a dream that kept popping up every few years, every time I thought I'd successfully smothered it and locked it into a trunk in my attic: I wanted to be a writer. I saw some folks around me have some success, and I became convinced that the only thing holding me back was myself--that if I let my obsession thrive, my writing would improve and I would find that selling your writing was not some pie-in-the-sky thing that only happened to those strangers whose names line the shelves in Barnes and Noble. It was actually a few months before March (*gasp* Pi Day!) when I got serious, but by March I was starting to see results, and starting to believe I was on the right track. I started to believe I was on the road to somewhere, and so I set out to document my observations.

Now I still haven't reached my writing goals. And when I do succeed in convincing somebody to buy my words, I know I'll have new goals in my sites. But I've been thinking for some time just the same that it was time for a new kind of web presence. This blog was, as I noted in that first post, intended to be a diary of sorts, that other people were welcome to read, but a diary specifically of my writing journey. The journey continues, but I've begun to want other things out of a website. I knew all along that this blog was likely of little interest to anybody but me, and I said right at the beginning that I wasn't looking to create an every-day what's-going-on-in-my-life kind of blog. In the time that's passed, though, I've begun to interact more and more online, commenting on other people's blogs, having a ton of fun at facebook, and lastly really getting into twitter. There are real communities out there: communities of writers, of readers, and of all around cool people. And I'm finding that after three-plus years, I want to broaden my scope.

On the other hand, I don't want to lose the period in my growth that this blog was always intended to chronicle, and so I've decided that the best thing to do is keep this blog for as long as Blogger/Google maintains the space, but develop a new website for most of my future online interaction.

I've spend the last couple of days tinkering with WordPress and I'm finally ready to start pointing people to that new page: labyrinthrat.com. If you're one of the half-dozen or so people who seem to have gotten something out of reading my blog over the last few years, I hope you'll follow me on my new one. Since it's going to be larger in scope, I hope to have a lot more to share with people over there. If I currently trade links with you, I've gone ahead and linked your webpage/blog on the new site. Those of you who link to me, if you'd update your links I'd be grateful.

I'm not entirely done with this blog. There are some milestones I haven't reached yet, and when I do, those observations really belong here. But there won't be very many more posts here in the future. This is not goodbye, but it is a transition.