Been A While...

Hello, all! I know it's been a while since I last posted . . . 

*checks date of last post*

Oh, I guess it's been a little more than just a while, about two months shy of two years. Eh, oh well. Not like you missed me that much anyway. I'm just a paramecium in a vast lake after all.

My absence is connected with my lack of writing. This is after all a blog to talk mostly about my writing with a few odds and ends and history stuff thrown in for shits and giggles. I haven't not been writing this entire time, but I've certainly have been not writing more than writing. Was that clear? And with that, I hadn't much to say. I am alive, so I guess that's a good thing.

For much of the entirety of 2015 I did not write. I tried, like a sentence here or a paragraph there, whether it was a short story or the current novel project that was supposed to be a novella (like that was going to happen, Ms. Long-winded writer type person). I wrote a few more chapters to Lake One this year and have some idea as to where to take it next, but my passion for writing is next to nothing. That passion was there when I lived in Ohio, but since I moved back to Michigan? I thought once I left my mom's house and got my own place, which I did this past November (2015), that my mojo would return.

Negative.

It did for a little while, but family deaths early in the year put a halt to my enthusiasm. It peaked a bit in the spring, then promptly died. Summer hit and gardening mode kicked in, and since it was an especially dry first half of the summer, most of my free time was spent keeping things watered and alive. Now that the rains have returned it's weeding and mowing the lawn while fighting mosquitoes. I can't wait until fall.

In these past couple of weeks I wrote a couple of short articles for the Facebook page of our town's newly formed historical society, of which I am secretary. That has sparked a little bit of interest in writing and research again in me and I'm going to aim for one article a week, though since there are three of us running the page we will share in adding new things to keep up interest, but not too much all at once--we don't want to inundate our readers with too much stuff. Don't want to be one of those pages that post twenty times a day and irritate our followers. Besides, we kind of want it to be like a sweet little surprise popping up on people's news feeds once or twice a week with a fun little historical tidbit about our town.

As for Lake One, I've written twelve chapters so far with some future scenes that may or may not make it into the body of the first draft once I get to those parts. After all, I am a bit of a discovery writer so things in the story change as I write it. Certain plot points will remain virtually the same, but the way I get to those points may change some, and the telling of those points will change some. I'd say right now I'm at about the halfway point at around 40k words, which is far, far less than Draculesti. I'm also at a point where I need to do some research for this next chapter and I'm just not feeling up to doing it. I could skip the chapter and proceed further, but I'd prefer not to. I may discover something in this chapter as I write it that could change the future chapters, which will then require rewriting. It's a first draft, there's going to be plenty of rewriting in the future drafts anyhow. See how I make excuses not to do the work?

Stupid brain.

Oh well.

This post was basically written to get things off my chest and if anyone actually reads it, well, thanks! Maybe next time I'll have more interesting things to say. And maybe I won't wait nearly two years to write a new post.

Also, someday I need to make this blog a little more cleaner. It's kind of a mess.

Until next time peeps.