Worst blogger in the world award goes to - Judy Hudson!
I set very low goals - once a month to update my blog and missed the last two months. I could list my reasons (It's my saturn return, that major life changing transit that happens every 29 years, does that count?) but I won't. I'll just hang my head and take the blame squarely on these broad shoulders.
I think that generous deadline I set myself, once a month, is partly at fault. It pushed it too far onto the back burner. the broken burner at the back of the stove. I often think of things to blog and without a set time maybe I'll do it. Once a week at least. That way it is part of your conciousness, part of your life. Like the class in writing fiction I am taking at our fledgling local university. It is a credit course that I am auditing - but taking it seriously. I got my BA in Fine Arts in 2000 and considered doing a masters at UBC this fall but it's really expensive, I'm writing genre fiction at the moment so thought it would be overkill, and was told by friends and family (all with degrees or some even professors themselves) that I don't need it. Maybe if I was 23, with no life experience... but at my second Saturn return I am far from that tender age. So I signed up for this course in the hopes of finding a writing community here in small town Vancouver Island. I have found a few people, the whole class are all potentially good, or just plain good, writers. and a few are even my age, not that that matters. And the class is really fun, gettin out of my office and into the world.
One thing it has me doing is writing short stories, something I never have mastered, or even really tried. I am finding it is great for fleshing out characters and tightening up my style. I was working furiously on editing my Fortune Bay (read: Honeymoon Bay) story, Summer of Fortune, and decided to write my short story assignment on a minor but important character, the ghost, Aunt Augusta. Now, she lives in the cabin and always has, but she never has a POV in the story. So I wrote the short story mostly from her point of view and found it so exciting I might write a prologue from her POV for all three books set in the cabin, to tie them together. I think this is a technique I will use again.
But about that isolation thing. I just read in the latest issue of Wrioters (I like that typo!) Digest that arrived yesterday more about how important social networking is. Yes it takes time, but it is part of doing business these days, networking, finding out what's going on and how other writers and agents and publishers are handling it all. Time to get with the flow, actually post something on my face book page and try to find out why people I respect say it is so useful. Time to invest the time in myself and my career. Bite the bullet and write out there.
This was not what I was going to blog about today, I was going to write about my experience at the Surrey International Writers Conference in Vancouver last weekend, but this is obviously what is on my mind, and I promise myself I will write that this week.