New Design

Well? Whaddaya think?

I like it. Feels a little more earthy, a little more natural. I liked the whole whole Space/Mountains/Rainy Window vista I had going, but this works better, I think. Can't guarantee this is how it'll stay, but we're going with this for now.

Maybe this little exercise in Blog Shui will help my mojo in the writing world.

On that front, I have a new story going that I'm pretty excited about. I'm a bit torn by it, though, because I really don't know where it's going. I feel like I want this to be my first legitimate crack at a novel, but that in itself creates a couple of problems.

The first problem is psychological. When I was in my early-mid 20s, I was relatively unaware of the short story. I was an avid reader, but I read novels, not magazines or anthologies, and I had no idea that there were sites dedicated to short stories online. As such, it never occurred to me that there was another way into the business besides writing a novel. That is to say, I didn't know that doing what I do now--write and attempt to sell short stories as an attempt to build a resume--was an option. So I plodded through beginning after beginning, Chapter One after Chapter one, having no clue as to what I was doing.

For some writers, writing novels is easy. Brandon Sanderson honed his skill by writing four or five novels that he never intended to publish. Eighty, ninety, one hundred thousand words comes easy for some, I guess. For me, not so much. I was aimless, and though even I could tell that my prose was promising, I had no sense of how to string a story together over the long haul.

Today, I'm the author of a dozen or so short stories over the last year and a half. I know my sense of story is better, but there's still that fear nipping at my butt. Do I have the stamina? Can I really do this? Is this story really worth it? If not, will I know that it's the story that's lacking and not me?

The second problem is that I have very recently become a member of a writing group that deals exclusively with short fiction. There is a very lenient one story per month minimum, but that could very well rise at any time, and I have a legitimate concern that I won't be able to meet the bar while working on this manuscript.

But hey, maybe this is all premature. I'm barely through a chapter on this story, so let's see where it goes before I make any decisions.