End of November again. Must be time to update the blog.
I finished the novel I was working on last November, not in time for the 2014 NaNoWriMo cutoff, but before the end of 2015, which seems like a victory of some sort, anyway. I still think Talk Therapy would have been a good name for it, but it's a definite desk-drawer novel for now, anyway -- it would have to be completely re-written before anyone would want to read it, and I learned more from writing it than I would from re-writing it. Example #1 of things that I learned from it: Writing novels takes a long time. Time is valuable; I'm not putting any more time in on a project that neither I nor anyone else is going to enjoy.
It was good for me, though. I learned a lot about grief, recovery, and forgiveness. I've always been pretty good at forgiving other people; it's been harder to forgive myself, or indeed even to recognize the ways I fuck myself up. That's something to keep an eye on, next time I have a grain of self-awareness available.
But I got no time for that noise now. I published one of the other projects I was working on, a poetry book called Forgotten Phone Numbers, available on Kindle and in trade paperback from Amazon and Createspace. I could conceivably make royalties off of it, someday, but so far I've spent $25 on proofs and $40 on a new word processor, so that should eat up all the profits for the next 100 years or so. That makes writing more a hobby than a profession. I'm lucky I married rich.
Moreover, I've made a lot of progress on another project that will likely be titled Walking on Daggers. It has the potential to be a novel -- but it has two natural breaks in it, and my attention span is much more novella than novel, so I'm aiming for making it a trilogy. Kids like trilogies, I hear (that "Star Wars" thing was pretty successful).
At that point, it's hard not to think of writing as a big piece of your life, with one book of poetry and three of sword-and-sorcery (although the protagonist wields a dagger and his only other useful skill is being a seamstress, so I guess that makes it knife-and-knitting). If I'm going to write, I gotta blog, too -- blogging is what all the writers say keeps your fan community engaged; it's key to marketing. I don't have a fan community and I don't like marketing, but what blogging really does is keep writer's block at bay. Blogging is writing for the days when even if you don't have a huge interest in writing what you're supposed to, you need to be writing.
I haven't updated the blog since summer because I let myself not write much since summer. It's time to be conscientious for a while, which I think is somehow easier in the winter. It's easier to be motivated to take up good habits when it's close to your birthday, anyway, and mine's coming up.
Don't buy me a copy of Forgotten Phone Numbers, though. Somebody already spoiled the ending for me.
http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Phone-Numbers-Del-Greer-ebook/dp/B018O729PO/
https://www.createspace.com/5820303
