My latest column with the Kitchener Post is now up. I’d like to thank my editors for paying me to rant about the lack of a proper vanilla dip donut at Tim Hortons.
Again I have to note that my pace on this blog is way off. I’ll be lucky to make ten posts this month, and my interest in talking politics, at least on this blog, has waned to virtually nil. I guess you can only bang your head against a wall for so long, right?
But the news here is good. My creative energies have been channeled elsewhere. The Kitchener Post is one outlet. Another has been providing writing for a growing apartment broker. I’ve also been in the thick of writing two high-interest, low-vocabulary books (one on the Battle of Gettysburg and the other on Navy SEALs), and there are not one, not two, but three fiction projects currently calling for my attention.
The big upside is that, for most of these projects, I’m being paid for my efforts, and paid reasonably well. I’m working at something I love doing, and that makes me happy. The downside is, however, that I can’t really talk about these projects very much. There are confidentiality issues involved in some, there are spoilers to worry about for another, and where those factors don’t come into play, the remaining problem is that there just isn’t that much to talk about, here.
I’m nearing the tenth anniversary of this blog, and my fortieth birthday. At one point, I was blogging every day. But interest in blogs has faded, both from writers and readers. Things have shifted to Facebook and Twitter. I’ve started to think about whether or not it’s worth keeping at this blog. But then the urge to write will take me. This blog is and remains my personal diary and writers’ notebook. Erin used to fill up pages and pages each day in her writing journals. Now she hardly touches them because she has fiction projects, and press releases, and a blog of her own. But I don’t think she’d ever allow herself to give up her writing journal completely.
Looking ahead, I expect posting will be somewhat slow. I’ve a new real estate-related assignment coming on stream in December, and I hope to get some writing done on Icarus Rising, a possible sequel to Icarus Down (it passed 6,000 words this past Tuesday, but since it’s a sequel, I can’t say much about it without giving away too much about the original novel). While Parliamentary Trains holds steady at just over 7,500 words, it’s still in my head as well, and could surge forward if Icarus Rising falters.
If you can, always try to have at least two fiction projects on the go. It’s the best way I know to deal with writers’ block.
And hopefully in the new year, I’ll have exciting news to report about my writing career, and I’ll be coming back to this blog more frequently, making use of its ten-year history to enhance my marketing skills on a new project. Until then, your patience with me has been most appreciated.