Howdy!

So , here’s the thing about blogs. I recently started reading them, and found they’re quite addictive. They are also quite abundant. So why would I start one? Why enter into the fray of self-absorbed thoughts? Why spew my much un-touted opinions out into cyberspace?

Perhaps more importantly, why would someone read it? Not that I want to dissuade you, because I hope to eventually write some gem of an idea. Some fabulous tidbit that has the masses raving. Of course I’d like it to be published by a reputable publisher, and to have received an advance on it, but that’s just me.

There’s this fine line between – damn that editor in my head. I got started on this idea and then realized I needed something more in the first paragraph and went to fix that. By the time I got back here, I’d forgotten what I was going to say.

This happens to me all the time.

In fact, I used to joke about needing to go to Storytelling 101 because I’d always get side-tracked in the middle of a story I was telling and go off on some completely unrelated tangent (which, I think is the definition of tangent, so I really didn’t need to say it was completely unrelated, but.…Hmmm. I’ve done it again.) I had, of course, forgotten all about this for many years (in which time I decided I wanted to write novels), and when I inconveniently remembered it, I was hip-deep in two books, trying to dig my way out of the story structures from hell that I’d created.

It turns out that in order to have a good story you have to have, well, a story. Things have to happen. And they have to not happen for reasons that the characters have to overcome. And the characters have to want to overcome those reasons. In other words, they have to want this thing that’s not happening enough to go through the things that I make up to put them through. It’s kinda fun in a weird way. But it’s also hard. Why would they want that thing so much? You have to give them reasons. And not overly dramatic reasons, either. But everything I’ve come up with so far is this awful tragedy. And I know it doesn’t have to be this way. I see it in other people’s books. (But then again, I see worse tragedies than I’ve come up with, in other people’s books, too.)

Then I get to thinking. Hey, it’s kinda like real life. Here I am struggling to get this thing that I really want (to be published) and even though no one (agents, editors) seems to want me to have it I keep trying. Why is that? There’s no tragedy that made me want this. No deep dark secret that made me want to write a book and see it on the shelves of a bookstore one day. (And another one next to it, or heck, even four or five at the same time – different titles, of course.) But it is something I want. And I want it enough to keep going through the things they put me through (rejection letters).

So, I’m jumping on the blog bandwagon. Still not entirely sure why. Or how often. But I hope that it releases me in some way and frees me to think of those non-tragic things that happen in real life, but in a way that makes you guys want to shell out the bucks for a really good story.

That’s it for now.