A Novel’s Worth of Blog Posts

Dingdingdingdingding! I have reached a milestone. This is my hundredth blog post. Do I get a prize? Does the International Blog Registry hand out plaques or commemorative clocks for this achievement?

No? OK, I’ll just have to make my own celebration.

I started this blog in November of 2011, because everything I read about publishing or getting published as a fiction writer said that you have to have on online “platform.” I started out trying to write about writing, you know, to prove that I’m a writer, but then realized that I’m not trying to get writers interested in my work, I’m trying to build an audience of readers. (Although I’ll take the writers too – wait, don’t leave. Come back, I didn’t mean it.)

As it turns, out, it has been a great practice. In the beginning I had grand plans to write numerous posts ahead, and then queue them all up and then spool them out at my leisure. I have managed to do that with the travel posts (because they spill out of me in a deluge – never a shortage of words when I’m talking about travel), but mostly, I wind up writing the post the night before, which seems not ideal until I realize that it has forced me into a practice. Rain or shine, hell or high water, I churn out my 500 words a week. And, if you multiply 500×100, you get … 50,000 (now that I’m an aviation mechanic student, I can do this kind of complicated math).

For those of you who have aspired to the writerly arts, you might recognize 50,000 as the number of words required to complete NaNoWriMo. I believe fervently in the power of incremental change and this is an excellent example. Write 500 words a week and you will eventually write a novel’s worth of words. Yes, it will take 100 weeks, but at the end of that 100 weeks you will have 50,000 more words written than you would have had if you didn’t do any writing because you were convinced you didn’t have the time.

It has been an interesting time since I started to blog. Back then I was working at Microsoft. I had begun to dream of doing something different, but was nervous about walking away from the corporate salary. I knew that while I wanted to try my luck at getting paid to write fiction, my manuscript needed more work before it would be ready to publish. And, I was getting so ground down by my job that I didn’t have a lot of energy left for anything creative. From that standpoint, the blog was probably a very good thing because at least it kept my brain lubricated and functioning.

Fast forward to now – I am 5 months out of Microsoft. I am a full time student. Unbelievably, I am learning to be an airplane mechanic. If I am able to put all the pieces into place, this schooling will provide an entrée into the world of aviation. School wrings me out, but in a positive way, because I know that I’m using my energy in the service of my dream.  Soon I will be working to help restore the world’s first Boeing 747. Really. Me. Former Microsoft grunt. I get to do this.

A few months ago I made the decision to pull the trigger on publishing my novel, and have a plan in place to have it on Amazon by November. AND I have an outline for a new novel, which will be the first installment of an adventure/mystery series.

All in all it has been an interesting trip – thank you for coming along for the ride.