New Beginnings

So I thought to myself, "I should start a blog!" which was immediately followed by, "That you'll write for twice and forget about?" Yes, self, exactly like that.

The idea was that I would chronicle my journey toward becoming a real writer. I've tried this in the past. I have an old LiveJournal on which I posted updates about my NaNoWriMo projects. Why don’t I just pick up on that? Well, you get made fun of for using LiveJournal. It's right up there with MySpace, full of emo teenagers and people who can't keep up with the changing face of social media. Point is, I thought I should start fresh.

Here I am, starting fresh.

I recently submitted a story for potential inclusion in a local literary publication (North Idaho College's Trestle Creek Review). This is kind of a big deal for me. Not just because something I wrote might be printed on actual pages, but also because this is the first thing in a long time that I actually let people read. I have a terrible fear or criticism and rejection, so I tend to hide away my rough draft stories and novels (all twelve or whatever of them), lest someone give me crap for the amount of characters I kill and maim.

Obviously, if I'm going to be a "real" writer, people are going to have to read it. So that's step one, getting over my paranoia and self-doubt. The other thing I'll have to do is write things that people want to read. I seem to have that in hand. I at least have a tenuous grip on it.

The idea for this whole blog thing is that I would post something at least once a week. Which means I need to be doing something writerly and worth posting about every week. I don't see how this could be a bad thing. They say that if you're going to call yourself a writer, you have to write every day. And I have basically no homework right now, so why not? I have a collection of half a million story ideas. I might as well sit down and try to write them.

That's the other point of the blog. If there are people out there who are expecting things from me, it kind of forces me to write something, so I have something to deliver. It gives me… accountability, or something.

So that is the plan. I'll be posting this just as soon as I come up with a clever name for the blog. By the time you read this, obviously, that will be done, so consider this a note from Past Me.

And if you are interested (I'm sure you all are), my submission to TCR was "A History of Falling Off the Wall," the untold story of Humpty Dumpty, a notoriously bad egg. I should know in April if it was chosen for submission.