New Focus

Kendal is leading the way in the blogging realm - far ahead of any of my own blogs with 57 posts to Confessions of a Canine Cyber-Widow since my dog and I first ventured into the blogosphere on June 13th. The Polyphagous Dragon is alone in second place with 28 posts (not a bad showing, since my recipe blog was launched over a month later on the 19th of July). The NCI Alumni blog is currently sitting at 14 posts, all written by yours truly in spite of the fact that it is meant to be a group blog, but I resigned my administrative & leadership roles within NCI last week and handed off management of the blog to a former teammate, so its content should cease to be mine in fairly short order. Which brings us to this blog.

Dragon Dreams was my first blog, meant to be my personal blog and perhaps main portal into the blogging realm, but in three and a half months, I posted 3 times. Not exactly an auspicious start.

Why has Dragon Dreams floundered? Could it be because I am a child of a time when personal journals were considered, well, personal? (I have one, which I've kept regularly for over 18 years now, but it's not published on the Internet!) Add this to the fact that I've become blog-happy and simply launched a new blog every time I set upon a new topic to write about and it's easy to see why my personal, topic-less blog has been sparsely populated. Things are about to change.

Sometime during this past summer's web travels, I stumbled upon a link to NaNoWriMo and knew immediately that I would be taking part. I have been writing fiction since I was five years old and always loved it, but I also love eating well, and the bottom line was the bottom line: My prospects for financial security were greater if I spent my time writing business and technical documents than if I pursued creative writing. So I compromised. I accepted a full-time employment situation and then took on another part-time job besides. I would work hard and save my money and retire to become a fiction writer once financial security had been assured.

My plan worked well for a number of years. Working hard certainly happened. (I frequently gave 70+ hours per week to my employers.) Living frugally and saving money happened too. (I was on track to own property mortgage-free by my 40th birthday.) Then events transpired beyond my control such that I now find myself no longer a corporate slave sometime earlier than my originally planned "retirement". There are strong indications that I still have a long life ahead of me, and a return to full-time employment at some point seems likely, but today I am free and finances are such that I can afford to devote November to writing a novel. So that is what I am going to do.

NaNoWriMo was born in San Francisco in 1999 and has since spread like wildfire around the globe. In November 2007, I will join an international community likely six figures in size, attempting to pound out a 50,000+ word novel entirely between the start of the day on November 1st and the end of the day November 30th. This blog will be an integral part of that quest.

True to form, I have launched a new blog, Raindancing Dragons, which will host the actual content of my NaNovel, but Dragon Dreams will be the staging site for my project and the place to go for news and commentary on my NaNo adventure. Stay tuned for more details coming soon!