Five years on...

     There may be life in this old place yet.

(Semi-regular updates coming soon . . . ?)

Dusting off the keys.

Hello all. I'm not sure how many people read this, but I suspect some do.

I've been absent these several months, sorting things out in my own life, and taking a break from writing in the process. I've put aside the blog for far too long, however, and wish to remedy that in that near future.

However, as many of you have seen, most of my pieces are short-form scribbles, lacking any real beginning, middle, or end, just scenes that exist unto themselves. Not that there's anything wrong with that; flash fiction is something I enjoy, and would agree with some that it has adapted creative expression and aesthetic appreciation to our faster-moving times. Short stories are always wonderful exercises in life, and the moment, independent of all the baggage we may hold, deserves celebration.

However, for the longest time, maybe a few years, I've had much bigger stories to tell floating around in me, waiting for the time to come out. I feel that this may be as good of a time as any to seriously consider that possibility, to start outlining and drafting, to commit myself and my time to telling them. It may take years still to write them, to finish them insofar as anything written can ever truly be finished, but it is a commitment I hope to make. Some of the very stories posted here will become part of them, some of the stories I treasure the most.

I also hope to edit a few pieces I've written in the past two years, in hopes that maybe, just maybe, I can finally submit them for publication elsewhere. I've had links to certain magazines, online and in print, open on my browser for almost a year now; maybe now that I'm feeling better about myself and where I am in my life outside of writing, I can follow-through at long last.

So there may be still gaps of considerable time between posts, and I may use this as a sounding board for some of my other projects, or possibly as a way to explain my method or highlight the works of others. Furthermore, I'm considering using a much more personal pseudonym for my future works in print; that, however, I won't bother revealing until I actually succeed.

Thank you all for your patience and commitment. I can only hope to do my best as a writer from this point onward.

A hint.

I've picked-up a pen-name, and have three simultaneous projects in the works. No other details until they go live.

A brief confession, and some process chatter.

      I've started on outlining two projects so far, and with any luck, I'll have a manuscript for at least one of them by year's end. Both are attempts at YA, which is a bit of a departure from my short fiction, but I honestly feel like doing YA would be the only way I can do a longer project than . . . say, five pages.
      What can I say? It's also not as pretentious a genre; it's genuinely more fun to write, and I always have the short fiction to make more of a "point."
      That being said, the crew over at O'nell Design (blog here) have been putting out some cool stuff for quite some time, and I'm always tempted to write something about the characters -- if only just for fun. I'm no "fanfic" author, and I don't intend to be, but there's something about those little figures that hearkens back to when I was five years old, writing stories starring my favorite Transformers and Lego creations...
      Anyway, enough nostalgia, at least until I crack under the pressure of my five-year-old self.
      When I last ran this blog, I sometimes used "themes" to guide my writing for the week, in an effort to genuinely explore different iterations of the same word or phrase. Since I've stuck with scribbles for the most part (as a lot of places snub their nose at running work that has been previously published anywhere, even a bloody personal blog), I'll be revisiting this concept every so often, if only to try and make writing fun for myself again. For example, next week, it'll be "anticipation" for a few days (the nerds among you will know why), while the next few entries might be "acceptance."
      Just tossing that out there for y'all...

Well, that didn't really work, now did it?

      It's what happens when you start a story that is both too similar to a current project and not thought-out well enough.
      So it's back to scribbles. Sorry for the delay, but continuity kills.

Changing gears, at least for a little while.

      In part because of this wonderful picture diary, I am inspired to do a bit more with LS, beyond random updates that have little to no bearing. This is, in part, because I became paranoid that I'd not be able to publish stuff elsewhere -- something that, in the end, I'm finding myself less and less liable to care much about.
      So, for the next few days, I will be telling a story, one that might spin-off elsewhere. I may attempt art to accompany it at some point, but nothing, as always, is certain...

Obligatory reintroduction.

      To be brief: this is where anything that comes to mind will go, once per day at very least. Formats are out the window. Scribbles and such are back in.
      Think of it as a giant Twitter-esque clusterfuck, only with creative writing and ranting instead of the other stuff.
      Anyway, enough talky. Time to write.