Here's the thing: it is my firm belief that if you want to be a fiction writer (and I've decided that I really, really do) you have to actually write. Not just blog. Not just think about writing. Not just talk to other people about writing. You must put the words on the page every day.
Getting to this point, where I'm putting words down on the page every day, meant clearing out all the noise, all the clutter. In short, it meant: stop blogging. The blogging used to get me into my creative flow, with a blog idea leading to a story idea and a story plotline inspiring a blog post. It worked. I was productive. I liked what I was writing - on the blog(s) and the book.
Then something happened. It all became too much. It felt like a job. I was blogging blindly - without inspiration - and no fiction writing was getting done. No words were making it onto the page every day. I could have soldiered on, but I had to be honest with myself. If a published story or book is the goal (even if that goal is never achieved or is only to be achieved in the distant, distant future), the blogging must be kept in check. The blogging cannot take the place of writing and when it stops being an effective way to inspire more writing, something has to give.
I didn't want to stop blogging. It hurt, viscerally, to step away from it all. To not only stop writing blog posts, but to stop my incessant reading of other blogs. But it was oh so necessary to find my voice again. And, to be honest, I've not even found it yet. Or at least not all the way. But I'm closer. Much closer than I was when I stepped away from the blogging.
And so - this is my tentative step back into the blog waters. But there will be new rules (as yet to be defined) put in place to ensure that the blogging never usurps the fiction writing.
