The whole moving and searching for a better job thing is going slowly, so even with school work, there’s been time to write.

Maybe I should not say, write, precisely. I have had a bit of time to pound out some new ideas and wrestle with some old ones, and I am coming to an agreement with myself about what I wanted to write, what I actually wrote, and what I hope to get written.

I’ve actually been working on a group of related stories based on a common inspiration for years, so there is more material for me to draw from than the seven chapters I’ve posted.

I’ve noticed that a few people have actually looked at those, so that’s a bit of encouragement to try and do something with them.

The funny thing is, if I posted my actual writing journal I would have something to post daily, but all my ideas, stark naked, would probably bend people’s minds and at the very least spoil any book that comes out in the end.

It’s amazing how much writing goes into just developing the world and characters of a book, though, and each new idea that crops up changes everything in both subtle and dramatic ways.

Just asking a simple “what if” at any point can generate a few pages of notes detailing the consequences of that revision. I don’t think anyone in my family really understands how I could spend years writing and never produce a complete manuscript.

As tempting as it is to think of that as a failing on my part as a writer, the absence of a complete manuscript does not mean I have not accomplished anything.

In the hundred or so partial manuscripts and related notes, I have generated enough ideas and plot threads to write consistently for the rest of my life—as long as I create a sound foundation to build them all on in the first work I bring to completion.