It’s been ages since I blogged. I’ve written a handful of drafts since then, but they all sit in draft mode, probably never to be finished, because the brilliant inspiration died once I got about halfway in and I figured if I wasn’t interested in finishing writing the post, it probably wasn’t the time to write it.

My blog still gets hits, which would amaze me if I couldn’t see specific stats 😉 90% of the traffic I see now is for things like ‘I love you but I can’t have you’, and Tumblr related images.

Maybe I should write more posts filled with despair about such things. Except mine will all be about my writing journey, and there are only so many times even I can talk about my own rejection before it gets old.

A large part of the reason I kind of vanished is because I’ve already said so much about my writing process that it was starting to get repetitive to me. In the past this blog has been a great place to vocally work through stumbling blocks, and that wasn’t working any more.

So, oddly enough, the reason I’m back has to do with my writing process. It’s a short version of where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to for the last year. Some of you may think ‘So?’. I’m sharing because I’m hoping others have had similar experiences and I want to hear about them, so this is me opening the dialogue.

• January: I decided I wasn’t going to be that author who only ever wrote one book, and then revised it 5 billion times, queried it just as many times, and could never move on. So I wrote two new books.

  (for the record, I’m still working on that book)

• February-March: Decided to combine one of the books with the book I swore I would shelve. Polished my novella and submitted it to publishers.
• April-September: The novella was so close…at least that’s what I gather from the kind rejections that say things like ‘the acquisitions team has decided…’. It must mean I’m close, right? So I wrote a romance novel. That garnered so very little interest, and even less when I tweaked it and made it women’s fiction. I probably shouldn’t say so, but my ego took a huge hit on that one.
• October: EEP! An agent wants to read that novel I swore I was shelving. The one I said I wouldn’t work on from now until eternity. Time to send it off, and see who else wants it. (this initiative died, and I’m still revising the story :-P)
• November-December: Wrote and revised another novel. I finished edits yesterday.

Over the last twelve months I’ve also met some amazing new critique partners, reestablished contact with a friend I thought I’d lost (who is my partner in clean-story collaboration, so very inspirational, and my link to insane sanity), and have probably weakened or severed some ties with some very good people who I should have been more kind and responsive to (translation: I’m the worstest, most irresponsible reader in history – turns out I want to read your books and enjoy them, not look for flaws).

And the way I give and receive feedback has changed so very drastically in the last 12 months I can’t even fathom how I lived without it before.

And those 4 new books I wrote/revised this year? That’s the biggest reason my blogging ground to a halt. Turns out when my creativity is being dumped into my fiction, the brain dump becomes second-string.

I’m still trying to figure out how to come back next year. I’m not certain how or if, but I still suspect I’ll be shifting at least some of my focus away from blogging about writing.

The thing is, I suspect this is similar to the thought processes of a lot of you out there, because I’ve seen a downward tilt of blogging in general over the past few months. So I’m wondering, what have you been up to? Tell us all, we want to know 😀