…but I have learned something. Blogging can be - no, not addictive - but one of those things that reproaches you by sitting in the back of your mind saying “you really must attend to this.” As in pay the bills, get that stuff to the dry cleaners, call that old friend you haven’t heard from in ages… Do something about the blogs. Plural yet. No, I realize, I am not nuts as I posited in that first post. What I’m doing is looking for another bolt hole. Something to do instead of write.
One of the most important lessons for novice writers is that writing is really, really hard. It is as if you are trying to cross a huge chasm because something you want desperately is on the other side, but to get it you must launch yourself into space and make an enormous leap of faith. Hard and scary. So you find reasons not to do it. Blogging is one of the more seductive.
You would think that by now I’d have learned how to quell the bad angels. I have not done so entirely - I doubt any writer has - but I can offer a few hard-learned techniques that usually work.
I must be nuts. I agreed to put a blog on this site.
I know I don’t have time to do what bloggers are supposed to do…
write every day, interact instantly with their readers, get deeply
involved in all the niceties and specialties and inter this and that of
bloggerdom…
It won’t happen.
I’m a full time working novelist (you know that, else why would you
be at this site in the first place?), I act as a consultant for my
husband’s business at http://www.agentresearch.com -
I do the Customized Fingerprint Reports that put writers
together with agents, I blog some there, I mentor a very
few talented new writers. SO WHY AM I DOING THIS?
Because I love talking about writing. The magic of it.
The way when it’s going well it’s as good as anything gets in this
life. Yes, I do mean anything.
Sometimes the agony of it. How hard it can be to make the
picture in your head get on to the page. How screwed up the
business of publishing often is. How luck plays a huge part in
all of it, and is something you cannot control. How neurotic you
have to be to want to make a living by closing yourself
up for hours, alone in a room, staring at a blank
screen. Very neurotic.
So that’s what I’ll do here, talk about writing. The other
blog is for agent stuff. This one is about the doing of the
thing.
And you’ll forgive me because right now I’m going to tell Mel the
Wonderful Webmaster (henceforth to be known as MtWW) to turn the
comments off on this page. If you really want to get in touch,
check out the contacts page and try my e-mail. I’ll answer if I
can.