Greetings and Long Explanation

This is not my first blog, but it is a blog about my first published novel. Oh, it's not published yet. But it will be. It is written, or at least drafted. I wrote it during the 2006 National Novel Writing Month. To "win" that competition, which is only with yourself in the end, you must write fifty thousand words during the month of November. It happens every November. I did it. My official word count for the month was 50,001. Okay, some of them were redundant, and even more of them were poorly placed, but the story is good, and now I'm revising a novel, not thinking about writing one.

If a month of forced novel writing sounds good to you, then by all means click here: NANOWRIMO. You can sign up right now and be all ready and rarin' to go come November. This year my goal is to write at least 50,002 words of a different novel. So that gives me until October 31st, Halloween, or Nevada Day if you will, to revise the one I wrote last year.

Some personal history might work here. I wrote my first story in the fifth grade. It sucked big-time. Oh, well, it was a story. Every time I have a job doing whatever I end up somehow mixing writing into it. It isn't easy mixing writing with babysitting computers, but I can do it. The only exception, interestingly, is when I teach. Heck, let the students do the writing; that's what they paid for, right? For years I've banged out movie scripts, but they sucked too. Last November I took one of those ideas and re framed it as a novel. The first draft su . . . well, it isn't all that great. But it is a complete novel, a good story, and I'm revising it chapter by chapter. As this goes along I'll describe some of the other things I'm doing to get the thing ready for publication. The first chapter is, as of now, the only part that isn't totally awful. It's awful, but not totally.

This story is a comedy mystery. It's about a guy who works for a company who hires groups of people to go out into rush-hour traffic and make life miserable for the rest of us. You always knew that was true, didn't you? Well, it is, and I managed to get the story of one group, and that group's team leader and his family and loves and hates. Not a bad concept is it? You will find a link to that first chapter, in HTML format, in the links list of this blog. I'll update it as I revise it. Right now it's lacking humor. Not that long ago it lacked any showing rather than telling. It had a lot of telling. Passive voice, even. Yowch! Well, that's the story. Whenever I revise the book, or do anything related to writing it, I'll post a report here. Tomorrow, for instance, I'm off to a local writers' conference. Should be fun and informative.

So stay tuned (I have no confidence whatever in the feeds, so check back often.) And feel free to contribute if you can. Writing is quite a hoot, isn't it? When the book is published I'll give one away on this site. (There, that oughta keep 'em coming back.)