The nature of writing is not beauty, it is not creation, and it is not wisdom.

It is compulsion.

It is the pressing need to release something that has been thumping around in your head. For a painter it can be no more than a color scheme, a composer might have to hear what a few notes strung together sounds like and a writer has to commit a line of prose, scenario, conversation, character or place to words.

It must be done, even if its only scribbled on the back of a bar receipt, sometimes only so that it can live in the real world for a moment before before discarded as trash or shoved in a pile of equally bad ideas.

Being a writer is a pain in the ass. The best ideas are fleeting and if they are not captured, no matter how sure you are that you can never forget them, you do indeed forget them.

The worst ideas parade as the best and sometimes after months or years of chipping away, trying to make them work, you realize the entire foundation of your project is a heaping pile of shit.

Unfortunately this seems to be the case for most early projects.

My first four novels were sacrifices to the writing gods. To prove I was serious about this compulsion thing. I had to learn the hard way that just because you wrote a novel doesn’t mean it is worth anything more than experience.

It’s unfair. Writing a novel can take years. For me it usually does. All to have it rot on your hard drive.

But a writer writes. And so here I am.

My ideas are lumps of clay. Some dissolve into silt, some are formed into the foundations of a great story.

As I finish the first draft of my latest project, I am cleaning up the final draft of an older project. This summer I intend to jump head first into self publishing with a young adult fantasy novel still untitled.
I will be sharing all my experiences here.

Lets see how this goes.