two ways to feel better about your writing… and other assorted updates

#1: read your old college writing, you know that writing you were sure was so good, that you were sure would be published some day? And oh, is it bad! Rest assured that you are a better writer now.

#2: try some other hobby as a novice. Join a community where there are lots of professionals doing amazing work. Fail badly and stand in awe. Then realize that you are not this novice at writing. At least there’s that.

Sorry, I haven’t written in this thing in FOREVER. I do have some stuff in the works. I have SO much stuff in the works! (Too much stuff in the works?)

practice: sunrise shootStuff #1: I’m beginning a 52-week photography project. It’s partly a New Year’s resolution kind of thing, but it’s also practice for a writing idea I’m putting together. My project will be photos inspired by pieces of my own writing – you’ll get to see the first one soon enough, and I’ll post them here, as well as on my Flickr page, each week.

Stuff #2: the writing idea I’m putting together. I’m sure nobody remembers, but a couple/few years back, I was working on a novel of linked short stories. It didn’t work – not really. I abandoned it, and began writing other things instead, one of them being my current silly little web series. But after nearly three years of work on that, I now know where I failed that first time, and how to do things differently this time. And I want to try again. It’s a ridiculously crazy idea, because I’m not sure I’ve even seen this format done before except in my own web series.

The idea is that it’ll be a novel series in linked stories – with photography! It’s still in such a tender and fragile idea stage, but I’m all kinds of excited about it. It’ll also be indie-e-published, because I won’t even begin to try to convince a publisher to get on board with this crazy business! I’m beginning to think I wouldn’t even want a traditional publisher if it was a possibility, because this is something I want to do exactly my own stubborn way. Readers can read the series by the chapter each week (e-format only), or in book form at the end of the “season”, which I hope to do in both e-format and print. The series won’t begin until fall of 2012 to give me some time to wrap up some of my other current projects.

This probably makes no sense to a lot of people, but if you follow my upcoming photo project, you’ll get a small taste of what I mean by it.

Stuff #3: the novel continues to be written. Part of the reason the series isn’t starting until next fall, besides just my photography practice, is that I want to get this novel good and finished and out the door. I’m currently about 40% through the second draft.

So that’s that then. I have a lot of (self-imposed) work to do! And Stuff #4: I also want to do a better job at keeping this blog updated (for anybody who still follows this old thing).