Where will the wandering writing wildebeests roam next?

It’s been a fun experience getting to learn the Wattpad platform and community over the past few months. Having observed some great talent serialize their works through online distribution, I am glad to have tried it out.

That said, it’s been close to 10 years since I completed work on my debut novel and less than 9 since I self-published it in 2005. 10 years later and I still haven’t recouped the initial cost of publication. But I didn’t write Human Resources for the money. Like graduating college, I ultimately did it to prove a point to myself that I could be persistent enough to see it through.

Since writing that book 10 years ago, I’ve had 10 years of experience reading new and interesting books. I have discovered authors that the person I was wouldn’t have read back then and have learned a great deal more about what great writing can look and sound like. And, I still have a ways to go. Maybe that’s why I hesitate to write anything new.

There are also new challenges I face as a person who is 10 years older, married, and a father of three. This isn’t to say that I don’t aspire to write again. I’m just not sure, outside of blogging, when that will be.

So, with that I'll leave you with a link to a pretentious aspirational poem I wrote not long after my novel called Bohemian Urge.

Happy writing. Happy reading!

Comments

Kids' Reward Charts and the Treasure Box

Being a parent to two children under 4 and caring a great deal about how our kids turn out with respect to manners and courtesy, I am so glad my lovely wife devised a daily rewards system ritual for the kids. The Process The kids need to behave a certain way consistently throughout the day and perform specific chores in order to get stickers. These stickers go into a chart or grid and at the end of the day we review and provide feedback on how the day went. If they fill up their charts, then they get to pick anything they want from the "Treasure Box". The Template Each child gets his or her own chart. The tasks or behaviors are "SMART" (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound). Don't worry, we aren't trying to micromanage our children like the " anal retentive chef ". Here's a link to a PDF of our two kids' reward charts if you're interested in trying this yourselves. The Review Process We tre...

Neverwhere on BBC Radio 4

Thrilled as I am to hear that Neil Gaiman's newest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane , has been published, I was even more excited to hear that Neverhwere the first book of his that I ever read had been adapted into a BBC Radio drama produced by Dirk Maggs. For those of you not already in the know, Dirk Maggs is the man responsible for the great "continuation" of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency that ran on BBC radio. So, not only did I just finish listening to one of my favorite stories, I got to hear it interpreted through a full cast produced by a man whose previous work had already won me over. The result? I enjoyed it thoroughly and could not stop listening. I think that time has shown me that Neverwhere is not a perfect story. If you haven't read it, it's basically about a man who, through performing an act of kindness, gets thrown into an alternate "fan...

If I Were a Carpenter (Bee)

Imagine if you will that you saw a pile of fine sawdust near the support beam of the stairs leading down from your deck. Next, imagine that you heard faint, pained singing coming from the direction of that pile. The closer you approached the pile, the louder the song became. Until you finally recognized the melody was this: Drawn closer to the song, you realized that it came from a perfectly circular hole carved into in the support beam. It's as if an itinerant handyman with a circle cutter stopped by to make a hobo sign on part of your house. Well, if you take out all of the stuff I've written up to this point involving Tim Hardin 's classic song, that's what we discovered this weekend at our house. We have carpenter bees ! Actual photo of the circular hole made by the bees Despite this beam being treated with stain, the bees made themselves right at home. According to the ever useful about.com, the next step to take to avoid structural damage is to a...

Walldren's World

Search This Blog