I’ve gone from active reader and passive-aggressive essayist to news addict currently wearing away the skin of his thumbs on the pages of Writer’s Market. The constant is genre fiction. But it isn’t right to come in and blow the dust off this thing every couple of months.

When you self-identify as ‘your own’ writer, when you belong to a group that has ‘always made up its own rules’ you don’t always know what the Hell’s going on in the rest of the world. When I wrote for independent comic people, and a not-so-independent newspaper blog, I felt more up to speed. To boot, I had so much fun getting into petty squabbles about local library funding, or the shenanigans of the Obama V McCain election.

The members of my writing group, ‘WYRMs,’ that is, are all wiser than I. They know how to focus, or retreat into the places that make them creatively great. I see them go on unimpressed or unassailed by the world outside. I’m the dim one. I’m the one fidgeting, interested in the rest of it, scratching at whatever’s beyond the glass.

When Gauntleteers come through your doors and remark, “Oh hey, that Quantum Physics Story Contest, Yo’ (direct quote) it makes you think. Actually, it makes you peer out the window again, and think, What else?

I know I hated being told I had to read a book. Now, I tell myself I have to write in this form or I may forget how. One thing to note of course is that I now love to read, and I’ve been absolutely consumed by the question of Commercial versus Talent. More recently, I’ve watched and admired those who advocate for free speech, and who write when it is flat-out dangerous to do so. See Raif Badawi.

This blog began as the obligatory ‘website presence’ every author is meant to have. But I don’t think I can stand that for much longer. I’m actually going to do what a writer is meant to, and put forth interesting content.

Or die trying, as the saying goes.

Or I could just rock a Live Journal like George R.R. Martin. You think?

#LJ Respect.

Mood: Sore
Current Music: “At the Bottom of Everything” by Bright Eyes
Currently Reading: Radical by Maajid Nawaz