Friday, May 9, 2014

Where I Break the First and Second Laws of Blogging

The whole point of a blog is to have something interesting to say with some level of frequency, and unfortunately, I haven't been able to do much of either this week.  Still, here I am, and here you are.  

The First Law of Blogging is that you have to update your blog frequently.  (No, I'm not going to say this like  it's a "Thou shalt" Ten Commandments thing, because that's hackneyed and done to death.)  In addition to marketing The Blessed Man and the Witch and writing the sequel, I should obey this First Law.  When you get right down to it, this whole blog is itself a marketing piece: I write things I want to write and hope you want to read, and then you become interested in what I have to say and you thence buy my book(s) and tell all your friends to do the same.  Also, the more I write here, the higher this blog is featured in search engines.  I'm sort of showing you how the publishing sausage is made here, but I hope you find the end result more appetizing than the process.  

The Second Law of Blogging is that you don't write posts talking about why you haven't been blogging lately.  Unless there's an emergency or a book signing or something else of general interest, nobody cares about how it's raining outside and you're kind of down so you've been watching Mad Men from start to finish on Netflix all week to get a good sense of Don's character arc or whatever.  Writers write, they don't make excuses for not writing. 

Unless you're me.  

See, we're moving to a new house, and this has kept me busy almost non-stop.  The last couple of days were spent painting my son's bedroom.  The tumult won't end for a few weeks.  Every day, I think about writing, about outlining the rest of the second book and making plans for the last book of the series.  It's a weird kind of longing: I want/need to get back to writing, but I need to deal with landscapers and contractors and builder supply store employees and junk haulers and etc.  In my head, I go back over the parts I've outlined and mentally rewrite them, even as I program the garage door openers.  

So I'm not quitting.  

There are low points, but I remind myself that I am in a marathon, not a sprint, to drag out that old cliché and give it some air.

Thank you, as always, for reading, and I will have something more interesting for you next week.  Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there, and especially to my wife, who's the best mother I've ever met.  Our little boy's really quite lucky to have her as his mommy.  Did I tell you we adopted him? 

TL;DR: Excuses and armpits, really.  Happy Mother's Day!

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