Novel Ninja

I’ll just come right out and say it. I haven’t posted in years.

The reasons why have been numerous. My life went through enormous upheaval since my last regular posts, going from lots and lots of work and distraction to losing my day job a week before my wedding and having to move across the country as a result.

Oh, yeah, I got married. In a fit of insanity she hasn’t yet recovered from, my longtime friend Lori decided she liked me well enough to put up with me for the rest of her life. You might recall Lori from guest posts on this blog, or her semi-regular posts on my other blog (also gathering dust), or possibly her own blog. Or her sci-fi police procedural novel, which was recently republished.

So that’s two distractions. We soon got two more, in the form of two tiny humans we shall call Munchkin and Rascal. No, I won’t be posting photos at this time, but I get random strangers coming up to me to tell me how adorable they are, so clearly they take after their mother. Munchkin is now old enough to be riding a bike. Yes, he’s only three (an’ a haff!), but he’s learning quickly. On the other hand, I now have to take the time to walk him up and down our street as he learns to pedal, balance, and look around at the same time. He’s up to doing about one and a half of those simultaneously.

Oh, and little brother Rascal wants to come too, and while I’m no longer in my wheelchair except for conventions, I’m not known for my speed so this is less than ideal. I have learned never to ask Rascal “What do you have in your mouth?” unless I already have hands on him, because he does a really good job at attempting to break the sound barrier with that kind of prompting. I can’t decide on whether to sell him to NASA or the Marines, but I’m leaning Marines at this point.

Anyway, job hunting, Covid shutdowns, massive depression, adjusting to both married life and living in a completely new part of the country at the same time, kids, and a ton of medical problems all around have really sapped any energy for blogging. Plus, while this blog has always been a place where people could find me for editing services, most of my business comes via word of mouth. The blog really started as a way to put up repositories of advice so I didn’t have to keep repeating myself for each client. I only posted writing advice when I had something I said more than once, and with everything going on I just had nothing new to say that felt like it would really contribute. I don’t post on the blog for the sake of posting.

But I had two things happen in the last year that made me finally overcome the inertia of non-posting. One was the Facebook group The WriterDojo, which is the discussion forum for the podcast of the same name. (I recommend you check it out.) There are a lot of people there asking for help, and it reminded me how fun it was to post helpful tips and answer questions. I remembered to save some of it for the blog, so there’s some content coming — I promise!

The point that finally got me over the inertia and into writing this post, though, was the podcast/streaming show Blasters and Blades. I was invited to join in on a fireside chat about maps, and I was asked to give the audience a website where they could find me. Well, dang . . . now I have to write just so people following the link can see stuff! The show will go live on the 14th, later this week. I’ll post a link when it happens, though probably not the day of because I’ll be pretty busy this weekend.

I can’t promise I’ll be on a regular posting schedule, but then I never was, was I? Even so, I didn’t start writing this post until I had over twenty blog posts outlined, so there will be content. I’ll be posting writing advice, reviews of both fiction and nonfiction, and general discussion topics on literature, history, science, and pop culture. I’ll mostly be rotating through on that pattern (advice, reviews, and casual analysis), but some of the posts might get split up into multiples in order to keep things easy reading; I’m not a fan of splitting posts to get twice as many hits, so I usually posted larger articles in the past, but at least one upcoming topic will likely be split into three posts just so you don’t have to take a meal break halfway through. And there will of course be the occasional update post, like this one; and hopefully in the near future, some of those updates will include free fiction for you all to read. More on that later.

I’m also going to try to do a minor revamp of the site; not to change the look (seems good enough to me, and I don’t need fancy), but to provide some better indexing to make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for. The site analytics show me that I’m still getting hits on searches for writing advice, even without posting in five years; I’m glad the archives are still useful, but I think I can make them easier to read through. It’ll also make it easier to find multi-entry posts like I just mentioned. You can expect the drop-down categories toward the top of this page to be reorganized shortly, but the new indexing will take a little longer.

Other news may be coming soon, but I’ll make update posts when that happens. For now, my next post is likely tomorrow, on how to use and plan through multiple drafts of your novel, and why it’s actually a good thing to go through total rewrites, not a sign of failure. After that, I’ll probably talk some history and then do a review of my #1 top recommended worldbuilding research book.

For now, enjoy your day and I’ll see you soon.