I realize my posts to both this journal and my blog have been sporadic these past few months.  I agree with something I read on the Flight of the Conchords website once, where they wrote something to the effect of facing a dilemma: when they have lots going on, they have no time to post about it and when they have little going on and have time to post, they have nothing to report.  For me, a lot of things have taken my attention (and the attention of my family as a whole), almost all of which are unrelated to writing.  Rest assured, things are still going well for us overall.  In the future, I may be able to reveal some of these items, but at present, they are a bit too personal for public display.

On the writing front, I was able to complete another science fiction story and send it out the door.  I’m back up to six stories in my inventory, four of which are science fiction.  I started a new fantasy piece, and I’ve actually written a detailed outline.  I found myself waiting for my car to be serviced yesterday and had some scratch paper on hand.  After writing a little, I just started thinking about the piece overall and how it might build and be resolved, so I made lots of notes.  This is highly unusual for me, but maybe it will work well for this story.

My near-future plans are to complete this story and then do the unthinkable: write a new novel.  Honestly, I didn’t want to tackle a novel for another fifteen plus years from now because my writing time is sporadic, and I know how long it takes to complete a novel (for me).  I also know how much research and work is involved in finding agents, querying agents, preparing submissions, etc.  All that and I’ve never actually gotten an agent and moved on to the next steps of bringing a novel to the market with the publisher and all of the edits that are involved with that.  So why would I write a novel?  Because I have a good idea for one that I think could work, and it isn’t like my ideas in the past that spawn into trilogies or the like; it would be a straight-forward single-serving fantasy novel, targeted for somewhere between 90K-100K words.  I’ve prayed about this as well, and it seems like a direction God is guiding me toward.  I do not take this direction lightly.  I’m very cautious in which writing projects I take on, especially ones that are more involved.  This is certainly not a set path that I will definitely go down; it’s simply a plan.  I think the fact that I’ve already written an outline for the novel and done a lot of thinking about it are indications that it will happen sometime soon, but maybe not until next year.  I’m full of excitement and dread.