Here we are, again. Me and you, whoever you are on the other side of the screen; in this specific case it’s me slightly embarrassed to be proposing a new start, another new version of my site, my blog, my life. How many times we’ve been here. How many times? Enough for it to have lost the flare of newness. How many times can a person marry before the honeymoon is just a fun idea? I don’t know, I’m still up for the first time but I know when it comes to restarting a blog I’m almost worn out.
But can you ever really be worn out of love? Can a writer ever really be worn out from writing, permanently, never to pick up the pen and free the birds? I don’t believe it. If your love is real, I believe that says enough. If you listen to their whistles, you’ll hear a song of words. So I beat myself up a bit for running the blog thing ragged. But we’ve healed some now, rebuilt and are stretching ready to run again (literally and figuratively).
Where are we now then? Well still working on that novel, a bit of a slog sure but I will never turn my back on the growth that sprung after I opened the floodgates during NaNoWriMo 2017. You might remember, or not, that I won in 2017, having written about 63k words or so in November. I signed up in 2018 as well although I didn’t get started until the second week. I made a grand push in the last 10 days and got about 20k words from the finish line when the whistle blew. Oh I was confident I would win and I could have but I didn’t manage my time and my focus was blurry, otherwise you bet your ass I could have written 20k in a couple of days. But I didn’t. That said while the competitive me was frustrated I didn’t win, the sunny side up part of me said well we’ll learn from this. If you can write like that then why not do it all the time? Tim Clare from the podcast Death of a Thousand Cuts talked mad crap about NaNoWriMo, saying he doesn’t think people should do it. And while I listened to that episode shaking my head, thinking my gosh Tim if only I could tell you (of course I could) that NaNoWriMo was what helped my novel take off. But he’s right when he asked why we need this thing for 30 days to write our novel? If you can write like that, then why only for 30 days? So I agreed with him in that regard and it’s something I reminding myself.
I’ve made a lot of headway. Had loads of “breakthroughs” although I’m still working on the first draft. Ugh. But I’ve learned to let my story lead me. Let my characters tell me their story. Let the wind blow and snag a strand of hair loose. Twist it around my finger, let it unravel as it may. Let’s say tentatively to expect this work in 2020. And in the meantime I’ll introduce you to some other characters I’ve found along the way of my writing journey. What exactly 2019 will hold for this blog I’m not going to say this time, I’ll just let it happen. Okay maybe I’ll at least assure you I will introduce you to some new authors (by this I mean their books, but maybe through other means) and loads of new books. Promise. If you need some new reading material, mostly fiction but this year I’m reading a lot of different material, I will be sharing plenty here. In fact, expect to hear a lot about books, not just because I’m writing one, but also because reading is very important to writing. You probably already know that, or maybe you don’t, I didn’t always. I have talked about this before yes, so we’ll expand on it, no problem if you’re new here. I’ll post some of my old reviews; they’re not formal by any means, and sometimes you might think I’m mean when really I’m just honest and passionate about what I read sometimes. Regardless, I hope you’ll converse with me, I welcome comments. Read some of my recommendations, let me know what you think. Let that author know what you think. Let everyone know what you think. I’ll tell you now you can give me book recommendations, I’ll look into them, but my list is packed! Who knows, maybe I’ll improve my reading speed and hit my TBR list (to-be-read) out of the park! Heck yeah!
There’s my intro. Let’s get to talking!