A Fond Farewell

I’ve been writing on this blog for what turned out to be almost five years. Five years now! That’s pretty incredible to me. This blog has survived two computer replacements and a lot of first draft musings. It was for accountability, and a way of showing off some of my writing. Over that period of time I’ve written nine novels, edited half of them and started querying. That’s progress, right?

Over the years I’ve tried to expand my knowledge base when it came to writing, but also on what was necessary to sell my writing. One of the things that keeps coming up over and over and over is the idea of a platform. It’s basically prior proof to editors and agents that I can write things that people will read. It’s not something I’m good at. Yet.

This blog and its readers have been fantastic, but for this next stage of my writing career I feel it’s important to make a clean start on a new blog, with a more precise focus than just “stuff about my life and writing”. It’s also an easy way for me to clean up the categories (which have been a mess for, well, five years). Mostly, it just needed to be a new beginning. I’m not good at blogging, and it still kind of shows, but I’m better than I was and I’m hoping the new blog will start out on a better footing because of it.

The idea is to write a blog about writing, and about building a writing career. Which I don’t know how to do, so right now it’s me muddling around in the dark, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to collect some useful information along the way that can be useful to others who are also muddling around in the dark. Who knows? At least I’ll be doing research into this stuff, right?

My new blog can be found at nocluewritingplatform.wordpress.com. It’s still a work in progress, something I’m setting up as I go, but I hope the people who have read this blog will join me there!

Brotherly Inspiration

Video games are a fantastically interactive form of storytelling, and one that I am only just barely exploring. It provides a different way of telling the story, and as such it can inspire some elements of stories in more tradition avenues, like novels. I’ve spent more than a few hours in various games (mostly RPGs of some kind), but in order to really understand some of the crazy things that can happen in games, I am going to cite my brother in this post.

Some quotes

Oops. As an accountability blog (which is still what this primarily is) I’m kind of failing, since I’ve neither talked about my progress on my book nor given evidence in the form of quotes. It’s funny. I’ve written eight first drafts so far (and gotten really flummoxed as to the editing process so there’s only a couple that have made it to draft two or beyond). After a while the book-writing part of this became commonplace, and I’ve spent enough time in these story worlds to forget that other people might be vaguely interested in what I’ve done. So here’s a few clips from the work that I promise I have been doing over the past months.

Where to start

One of the things I come across when looking at ways to get published is that you need to have a platform as an author. What this means is an extremely variable concept that changes from person to person, what the book is, and what kinds of sites the author wants to be involved in. Needless to say (love that cliche), it’s all complicated.

How to cope (or not) with the trauma of an emergency laptop replacement

My laptop broke last Saturday, and by Monday it was replaced. It was traumatic, and even if I had all my files backed up I still felt foolish that it happened at all. See, it started because the old computer fan had to be replaced. I could hear it dying and thought it would be a good idea to change it out for a new component (and no, I did not do this myself. This is why God gave me tech-savvy relatives). Well, it never turned back on again. We think that a little static just got into it and that was it.