And he's back!

"We dance across til we drop, the bells keep time and never stop..." Carbon Leaf - Lake of Silver Bells

And here's to a brave new year...just before it ends. But taking some time off from the blog has been good for me. Simply put, I spent more time living and writing and less time talking about them, and that was good. But I have things to say again, so I thought I'd say them. In the meantime, an abridged review of things that have happened since last I wrote:

I bought a car for $700 and put 10,000km on it driving around New Zealand for four months. I worked for a fantastic (indie) bookshop, where I read everything from Sun Tzu to Robert Rankin to Geography textbooks. I finished Book One of Soulwoven, then decided I ought to wait until I finish all the books (three to four, I'm expecting at this point) before publishing any of them. I climbed some mountains, hiked some trails, took lots of pictures, got into great shape, got mushy again, returned to the U.S.A. (where I discovered it's a lot more difficult to live than in New Zealand), spent a summer in the woods writing and doing little else, returned to the town I went to college in to be with the one I love, discovered how to live on minimum wage, and watched helplessly from the sidelines as the publishing company I interned for hurtled off a cliff.

Phew. That's not even everything. But I'm writing well these days, somewhere around halfway through Book Two of Soulwoven, meaning somewhere around halfway through the whole story, and that's exciting, especially since I only finished Book One about six months ago. And that's a good thing. So here's to more writing, and hopefully some more blogging to go with it. :-)

...and he's back!

"She wants to touch me (whoa-oh), she wants to love me (whoa-oh)" - Don't Trust Me, 3OH!3

Hey! I'm back! And in the meantime, Blogger has added a "monetize" button at the top of my blog posting screen. How interesting---it's now easier than ever for me to sell out and make money off of the few people who read this by slapping ads on the blog, you say? Bollocks, I say back.

Anyhoo, college is done, and real life is just starting to gear up. Sad to report no luck so far on finding work in publishing (there isn't much in Denver, so it's sort of a waiting game), but I did find work. Which means I can pay my bills, and write on the weekends. And start blogging again, I s'pose.

Today's topic: life and living, and how it relates to writing.

Having now passed beyond school and into the world of the 40 hour workweek (which, it seems, is more like a 45 hour workweek, given the nine-hour shifts broken up by a one hour lunch, and a 50 hour workweek if you count the time I spend commuting...), the time I have for writing has been significantly shifted. I'm so exhausted when I get home from work most days that I just don't have time for it, and it gets shunted to the weekends.

But the weekends are also when I get to spend the greatest deal of time living. And life breeds art. Last weekend I climbed two 14,000ft peaks. And aside from the raw material that sort of experience gives one to work with, getting out and living life is sort of like a shot of caffeine for the brain. I write better the more richly I live.

So now it's all crammed together, the writing and the living inhabiting a 48 hour space every week when I don't need to show up to work. I'm not sure how tenable the arrangement will be, but I intend to strive to make it work. After all, one thing I've realized is that the best writers tend to be interesting people who do interesting things (read Neil Gaiman's blog sometime if you don't believe me), and that sounds pretty good to me on many levels.