I'm weighing in at 42,000 words right now. Unfortunately, I've been distracted with marraige plans and school and working to feed myself and blah blah blah. I've got to write. Move forward. And all that junk. So here I go.

Writing in Blogs

Now that I'm back in school, I find myself with a lot more time to peruse the internet, read blogs, update my own blog, and do general research on the science of writing fantasy. Some people call this extra time "class" time. I call it "if they wanted me to pay attention they wouldn't have provided wireless internet or made me read Beowulf for the fifth time in my life" time.

I have always considered myself a student of writing fantasy and science fiction. That's what I'm in school for. My grades are little more than a set of letters they give me at the end of every semester-though conveniently I maintain a B average while having to do little work.

So grades are not a point of pride or measurement for me. What matters is what I accomplish. This fall I'm working on my novel, but I'll also be writing up a grant proposal (once again) for a work of historical fiction based upon my work on Hero Kyros, and writing several short stories for submission into the BYU writing contests that I placed in last fall. Oh yes. I'll also be getting ready to get married. And working part time to pay the bills.

I was thinking, as I did some catch up reading on blogs of my friends and contemporaries, how difficult it is to cultivate a blog if one wishes to have readers. Even a small blog, like the one I keep up, is really a pain in the rear. First, one must write consistently in order to keep his reader numbers up. When you don't post, you drop down to hardly anyone looking at your blog. When I was posting three or four times a week, I still only got, at my highest point, fifteen or so visits a day.

Second, you need your writing to be consistently interesting. You have to say intelligent, witty things. In a writing blog those intelligent, witty things need to have to do with writing, or the art of writing, or of things I've read, and so on. Even for a genius like myself (wink, wink) this proves annoying when you have to do it several times a week.

Thirdly, if I want to say intelligent things, I need to be reading all the time. Other blogs, other peoples' thoughts on writing and reading science fiction. And not just other blogs and articles but books. Lots and lots of books!

Which I cannot afford to do these days, when my schedule is so ridiculously packed. For instance: I stumbled, quite accidentally, across the paperback of Midnight Tides, the fifth book in Steven Erikson's series (a series I cannot praise highly enough and has influenced my own writing significantly). So I read it. I read it when I should have been sleeping. I read it in class. I read it at work. I read it when I should have been conoodeling with my woman. I finished that 960 page behemoth in two days.

And oh crap I just found the sixth and seventh books on Amazon. There goes another week and forty bucks.

So that's why I can't afford to read right now. My soul gets sucked into it and I don't accomplish all the other things I should be doing. Like writing.

So. Update.

36,000 words finished in Butcher's Price (current working title of my novel). Goal: 150,000 words.

Finis.

Time to go to the next class.

Robert Jordan died.

Suck.

Hey, look at that, I'm back.

My whole, "set goals each week and meet them" thing fell apart. So that's unfortunate. But I am getting married soon. Not completely sure yet, but either November or January (so as to avoid the major holiday rush).

That's my excuse for leaving off the writing. It's a good excuse, but all excuses are just that in the end: excuses. But I have gotten back into it, with all my school stuff.

My book is up to 35,000 words. I need to make some serious progress on it over the next few months before I get married, but I probably won't finish it until April. Hopefully sooner.