Moving Forward
Looking at the last post in January and where I was then vs where I am now, I am shocked at how much has occurred. How much and how little. Two biggies, finished my MBA and witnessed the surprising early birth of our second child. All well on that front, couldn’t be better in fact, but little to no writing since then.
There are a number of reasons I could cite for not being more active this year. The two above took up a lot of my time but I could have made time and didn’t. Really and truly, my mindset has been the true deterrent. I posted on November 24th, 2015 that I would not be posting for the next few days. I needed to take care of some work stuff. There was a thing that was coming up and at the time I needed to focus until it was done. So I took some time off. That was true, but eerie to read now in August. Eerie because I have a visible indication of my thinking before and after that moment, with a massive eight month gap that painfully illustrates how long it took my to get past it. At the time I literally thought it was going to be a day. I realize I am being vague, and that is by design, just know I turned a milestone into a millstone and it has been weighing me down ever since.
That changed today. The millstone has been cut away and I have closed out an interesting chapter of a different avenue of my life.
I made a promise to myself that as soon as this thing was done, I was going to write. Tonight I began to take inventory of where FayTown Calling is. It has been a while, so I am looking at where all of this is to see what needs to be done. The good news is even though I have been reprehensibly negligent of my writing, I never stop thinking of this. Virgil’s world, his story, where I want this to go, has continued to evolve and FayTown Calling has been building up in my head. At some point in the past year I even outlined the series which helped me to frame the overall arch of Virgils McDane and where we’re going with him.
For the foreseeable future I will be taking inventory and developing habits again. I have to relearn some things and reboot. I will continue to post here to develop at least a few of those habits. I will also be writing. The blog is going to serve a big part of that, and in many ways than one. It needs to be a habit, even if I’m not writing about, well, writing. I always felt guilty whenever I posted something up here about gaming or movies or whatever because I was just leaving a visible evidence trail that I wasn’t writing fiction. The truth is though that I do more than write, and while I am going to be making a conscious effort to manage how much I am writing (or not writing), I also have other things I love to do and I want to write about them. Since I wrote my last post, I watched Mad Max and the Martian, went insane over the new Star Wars, binge watched House of Cards, Brooklyn 99, and Stranger Things, played Overwatch, Pokemon X, and Destiny, have continued to hate the execution of Pokemon Go and Nintendo’s business model as a whole, started reading comics in a real way, have read a ton of great books, and had all kinds of other thoughts on a wide range of shit.
Do you care? Hell if I know, but this is my damn blog and I’m gonna talk about it. Because I need to be comfortable talking again. Because I need to be comfortable about writing again and sharing where I am and using that to be excited about writing and telling stories and creating and making up shit and everything else. It’s all connected, at least the way I do it.
Gonna finish this up with an apology. Because a lot of people, more than I ever thought would be interested in my writing or care enough to ask, have inquired about Virgil and FayTown Calling in particular. I have been missing in action and ignored that reader base. I am not the most sociable person, especially when it comes to my work. Just the thought of considering these inquirers “fans” (note that I just called y’all a reader base) makes me uneasy because I feel it insinuates hubris.
So, anyone who has read Sorcerer Rising, and especially if you have inquired about FayTown Calling or anything else regarding my writing, I apologize for my lack of response or attention. Please know, I am honored by anyone who has given me their time and/or money. I am terribly uncomfortable accepting praise. Words always fail me in writing those types of responses, which usually leads to my neglecting to respond at all. What it always boils down to is simple this, thank you for reading my work and I am glad you liked it. Behind those words I am literally going insane with joy and could go on and on and on about how much these message mean to me, but that pretty much hits on the root of it.
As for the status, I am too early to give a timeline. Just know that I have reprioritized this in my life and am very, very interested in getting it done in published. Partly because I have a clearer idea of what I want novels three, four, and five to be.
As I progress, I will update here. Can’t promise pretty but one of the things I have learned in the past several months is that those first, stumbling steps are ugly and oftentimes painful. And that’s okay.
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