So since I started this blog at the beginning of my fiction-writing journey in February of 2016, I’ve taken great pride and care to post regularly. By “regularly” I’m pretty much shooting for once a month. It’s served as a place to share ideas and news about my successes and setbacks as well as brag about some fellow authors who are pretty damn terrific. It’s also been a bit therapeutic for me to review old blogs and remind myself that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and that it’s a good thing I am, in fact, a marathoner.
While I pride myself on posting regularly (pay no attention to the second half of 2016, please!) I also pride myself on being somewhat tech savvy. (Strong emphasis on the “somewhat.”) I’ve successfully assembled and maintained several websites and Facebook pages, despite having no formal training in the tech world. This fact became glaringly apparent to me earlier this spring. There is a gap from March of this year to today, when I couldn’t keep my website from posting anything further than “access denied” for weeks on end, despite several attempts to address the issue with tech support. The posts I did enter for those dates seem to have vanished into the great vastness of the web.
Not long ago, this technical problem (caused probably by malware and not anything I did wrong) would have upset me to no end. I wanted to keep my posting streak alive, darn it! This is part of my author platform! How unprofessional to have “access denied” crop up when searching for my URL?! But seriously now? Pitching a fit is not going to bring back those missing months or fill in for those missing blog posts. We reboot, we restart, we move on.
Here is my real hope — that if, potentially, a literary agent has come across these words and noticed the gap in between postings, he or she will be able to reflect on my calm of character after this exceedingly long hiccup in the wild and woolly tech world. Because, as we all know, things go wrong. Websites get glitches. Plans get changed; deadlines get adjusted, or delayed, then adjusted again. The further I go along in this author process, the more I realize that 1) patience is key and 2) nothing is ever going to go exactly according to plan. The best we can to is to reboot, restart and move on.
Speaking of moving on, I had no idea how much fun it could be to take a short hiatus from writing women’s fiction. Earlier this year, I mentioned that my daughters were giving me a hard time for only writing stories that were too “adult” for them to enjoy. So when a glittery, fascinating idea popped into my head earlier this spring (read about that here) I had to sit down and type it out. As of today, I am 30K words into my now-even-more fascinating YA novel, NINE CIRCLES. Easily my favorite part of this process is that my girls, who beg me to read them a chapter-in-progress every night, seem to be enjoying it as much as I am. If absolutely nothing else comes from this, I will at least have made good on my promise to write something just for them.