This Blogging Things Works Wonders! (Insecure Writer’s Support Group)

Day 3 of plotting and outlining before NaNoWriMo kicks off. It’s going, that’s all I’ll say about it…it’s going. Nothing pithy or eloquent to declare about how the outlining process is coming along for me, so I won’t force a few words on the topic.

So I’ll take this opportunity to talk about blogging, and how I’ve rediscovered the art of blogging, and what’s it’s done for me since I brought this blog site online. Most importantly, keeping this blog going has given me the focus and support I need to keep my writing going.

(Also, this is a rather cheap attempt at incorporating the Insecure Writer’s Support Group into this blog. Sue me)

To recap: I’ve been running this site for 6 weeks now. 32 blog posts (including this one), averaging 5 blogs per week. 235 total comments. I’ve earned 70 followers (give yourselves a pat on the back for finding me and coming along for the ride!) during this time. But this is the stat that floors me: 864 views all-time. Wow. Now, it may not seem a lot, but to me, it’s validation that me jumping back into the blogging game after an extended absence and a brief, tentative return was indeed a good idea. So, yay me.

Honestly, I’m pleasantly surprised. I was expecting the views and follows to simply trickle as time went one. Regardless of whether I got a lot of views, or very little, I was determined to make this site mean something. A chronicle of my life as a fledgling writer, along with the day-to-day tribulations and triumphs that make up my life.

A big thank you to all my subscribers, and tell your friends, okay?

Now that I think about it, there is something about writing I wanted to touch upon, so here goes…

There’s a lot of advice I’ve been reading on WordPress. Advice on finding the right agent, whether to self-publish or go the indie route, when and how to query your manuscript, etc. The bloggers who openly dish out this advice are bloggers whom I follow. All very useful, of course. The thing is, I can’t be bothered with that kind of advice. Not yet, at least. I tend to be singularly focused, meaning once something has my complete attention, everything else tends to fall by the wayside. This works wonders for things like, oh…relationships. Maybe even your employment. I’m one-track minded like that.

My point’s this: I’m not one who likes, if you’ll forgive the cliche, to put the cart before the horse. All I want to do right now, right until December 31st, is get this draft of my Work-in-Progress done. Then edit. Then re-write. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. There will come a point, I know, when the time will be right to submit queries and research markets and hopefully find an agent who believes in my writing. As much as I want to absorb all this, I just can’t, for the time being. Maybe that’s the insecurity in me, but I feel like I’m doing the right thing by focusing on one task. Better yet, that’s the project manager in me; in any project, there are tasks, and each task has a dependency. In order for me to finish this project – i.e., ready for publication – there are dependencies that have to be met in order to progress to the next task.

Man, I can’t seem to let go of what I do for a living, even in my writing. Sometimes I hate being a project manager, even if it pays the bills.

I’ll leave you with this wonderful piece of affirmation I read earlier tonight, courtesy of Amy K. Nichols: Leading a Double Life.

I swear, I feel as if that post was written about me.

On a side note, I saw this floating around the Intertubes today: Lynne Ramsey’s Moby Dick is one giant leap closer to space. The director of We Need to Talk About Kevin will be re-imagining Melville’s masterpiece as a sci-fi movie.

Hmm. Not a bad idea. However, a sci-fi version of Moby Dick already exists; it was called Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

(This blog was brought to you by the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. If you haven’t joined, what are you waiting for?)