Happy new year (Photo credit: Amodiovalerio Verde)

Happy New Year!

I’ve been kind of quiet lately, most of which I can blame on the holidays (Three weeks off work!  Snow!  My annual Christmas cold!), but not entirely.  This wasn’t intended to be the kind of blog where I talk about everything that’s going on in my life, and unfortunately, most of my energy this winter has been spent dealing with Things That Are Not Writing.

I don’t really go in for New Year’s resolutions, but I did take a little time to think about my writing goals for the year: finish my rewrite of Unborn by April 1, get a first draft of my next novel (working title: North) finished by October 1.  It also seemed like a good time to reassess the website.  Breaking news: I’m probably not cut out for a regular, post-a-week schedule.

And you know what?  I think that’s fine.

When I started the blog, I read a lot of advice, most of which focused on Building a Platform, i.e. how to get as big an audience as possible, and of course they all stressed the importance of getting good content out to your readers on a regular, predictable basis.  But that was never really the point for me.  I never expected my blog readers to be potential fans who would start clamoring for my work before I’ve ever been published.  No, I’m pretty sure the readers I’ve managed to attract are all writers like me.  (And family.  Hi Dad!)

Ultimately, the blog is for me.  There’s no point in writing posts just to be writing.  I’ll save that for my fiction, thanks.  The internet at large, and the writing community in particular, don’t need me regurgitating the same old advice, retreading the same tired topics.  Instead, I’m hoping to dig a little deeper.  I read constantly, but I tend to get lazy, and not spend much time thinking about any one book or article.  One of the reasons I started the blog was to encourage myself to slow down and establish a coherent opinion on Things I Think Are Important.  I know myself.  That’s not going to happen once a week.  But over the course of 2013, I’m hoping it’ll start to happen more often.