Engage.

Mood: Melancholy
Music: Take It To The Limit, The Eagles

I said I might be back.

My new blog will follow my new venture, which is, in a nutshell, to become a published author. I do not mean having a short story published in a magazine, although if that happens you will know it from the massively sized font I will use to announce it from this very blog. I mean a novel. A book, with a hard cover, preferably, and no photographs of large busted women bursting from their blouses on the cover. My book.

My earliest recollection of writing is in middle school, where I wrote a short story of such disturbing subject matter (gang rape, anyone?) I was sure my teacher would immediately call my parents and suggest psychiatric evaluation.

He didn't (others did, but he didn't). He read my story and responded to it the way one writer generally responds to another writer's work: with a sincere eye, useful criticism, encouragement to keep writing, and yes - the suggestion that perhaps the plot was more than slightly outside the scope of appropriate topics for a pre-teen to tackle (I had never been in a gang, or raped, for that matter. I still don't know where the story came from).

Since then, I've wandered from hobby to hobby, from jobs to careers to relationships to motherhood to marriage to [insert activity here], and recently, I decided to return to the one thing I did before I did any of the rest of it: write.

I have a completed manuscript, and I'm proud of it on many levels, not the least of which is its status as the first story I've brought to completion to this degree. I don't know if this one will be the "one", but I'm certainly going to bug everyone I can think of about it until I am convinced it is not. Meanwhile, I am at work on a second manuscript, not to be confused with the plethora of short stories on my hard drive, some of which I will occasionally post here.

What this blog will mainly be about, however, is my journey to getting published. I'll update the page on the good, bad and the ugly. I'll rant about disappointments, and scream even the slightest accomplishment from the rafters. I'll try out plots here, and try to eek out some feedback (I won't, however, post details or excerpts from my full manuscripts, just for the sake of not having to knock on any cyber wood).

If you hang in there with me, you might find yourself entertained, but even if you decide you're just stopping by, never to return, I am heartened to know that one more person in the universe has "heard" me proclaim my return to my first love in the simplest way I can:

Hi. Nice to meet you. I'm a writer.