It’s NaNoWriMo season and the internet is awash with writing advice, much of it focused on the early stages of getting words down and belting out a first draft. At the same time, I holed up in my apartment with the lights off, illuminated by the glow of NXT playing on the WWE network, quietly trying to shake the very mild panic attack that inevitably follows every conference I’ve ever attended.
It would seem a stupid time to start considering returning to regular blogging, with a focus on the craft and business of writing, and yet I find myself doing so. It’s been five months since I swore off using the blog for such purposes, but I’m surprised how often those old blog posts about writing have come in useful since then.
GenreCon was the most recent example – the news filtered through that I was going to need an opening night speech on short notice, and once I knew the topic I wanted to talk about, it was surprisingly useful to be able to dig up an old blog post and find the key take-away that could be adapted to a new purpose.
I did something similar a few months back, when someone asked me to do a presentation about writing. There were three or four posts I’d written that addressed the topic, so it was easy to pick ’em up and adapt them as needed. I’ve lost track of the number of times, at work, that having already thought about a topic was useful.
For all that I felt like I was banging on about things I didn’t know enough about, it wasn’t like I stopped doing it. It just happened in different locations and, occasionally, the prep work got a little more arduous.
And since I’d already fallen into the habit of posting here regularly, in the lead-up to the con, so I figure I may just follow that particular instinct for a while. Or, at least, find a happy medium between thinking out loud and rambling on about life.
Which is good news, I suppose, if you were the kind of person who enjoyed showing up here for the bits where I wrote about writing. Less good, I suppose, if you were more of a fan of the long silences punctuated by the occasional flurry of activity.
