What I Decided

All of your advice made it immediately clear to me how to move forward with this old/new writing/publishing/dream-achieving project.  Like most of you suggested, I’m going to go the direction I was leaning and keep everything here on my main blog.  Not only is there an audience already here, but promoting a third blog would take a lot of time and distract me from the whole point of this project: to start writing fiction seriously.

Writing up short descriptions of each novel, it became pretty obvious that the only time I ever make any progress is over the Summers and even then it’s pretty minimal.  I want to make writing fiction not just that thing I do when I have the time, but the thing I do all the time.  That’s what I want to do, but sometimes it takes self-discipline even to do the things you enjoy.

I don’t plan to change this blog in any dramatic way, but I will be writing more about writing.  You will find all the important posts right here and in my normal feed, but I will be using the new Writing Section of this blog as the hub for all of this stuff.  I will also be posting short updates over there, as well as random thoughts and different things that are inspiring me,  Tumblr-style.  It has a feed, but I mostly imagine people will just check it out once in a while when they’re already here (link at the top of my home page).

I’ve been itching to get started, but I was away on vacation in Phoenix.  (It was awesome; lots of drinking and sitting by the pool and laughing with my family and even some friendly political discussions and a Spring Training game.)  While sitting by the pool one day, I wrote out by hand (not my preference) a page for each of the two novels I’m working on with a basic summary, a history of my work on it, and a list of some of the music that has inspired me along the way.  I’ll probably add more as things progress.

I’m still on a break from blogging, but I’ll be back in another week or so to really get things started.  I don’t usually ask for advice, because I’m very independent-minded and, in most cases, it doesn’t even occur to me to get other people’s opinions on what I should do, but it was so helpful hearing from people; it gave me new ideas and helped me solidify the ones that were already floating around in my head.  If you have any more advice as I continue along, I would be happy to hear it.  I’d especially appreciate some recommendations for other writing blogs.

Thanks again for being awesome.  For reasons that make no sense to me, people in the blogosophere and in my real life are almost exclusively nice to me.  I have a bad habit of  disregarding most of the nice things they say and focusing on the other crap instead.  But, when people talk about my far off dreams like they think I’m capable of achieving them, it means a lot to me.  Whenever anyone ever mentions reading one of my books some day, it makes me grin.  And it makes me want to write!