anniversaries

I always miss my blog anniversary these days. It was August 21st — and on that day this blog was 14 years old. During that time, I have written 857 blog posts (!) and a few pages. Plus some posts and pages over here: utownwriting.com and here: utownwriting.com/stevie1.

Here’s the first blog post: “A New Blog

But we’re also getting closer to another anniversary — next year it will be 30 years since I started my first novel (A Sane Woman), and 15 since I finished it. (I was about 45 when I decided that reaching 50 years old with two (2) unfinished novels no (zero) finished ones was just intolerable.)

I’d been writing for 15 years before I started A Sane Woman, but there was nothing that I wanted to finish. But what really changed was that I came up with the idea of publishing A Sane Woman myself, in little monthly chapbooks.

But they cost more to produce than I could charge for them, so the more people who bought them the more money I lost.

But then I heard about BBSs. I could join BBSs and upload my stories, and people might read them. And it didn’t cost anything. But A Sane Woman didn’t work in that format — the pacing was wrong. So, I started another novel that would (which is why, all those years later, I had two unfinished and no (zero) finished novels — but that was solved by finishing them).

And since then I’ve pushed to finish everything I’ve started, and my track record has been pretty good — not 100%, but I’ve only abandoned one (though now I see how I could go with it…) and put one away after finishing it because the story went in the wrong direction.

There are times, with some stories, that I say, paraphrasing Nero Wolfe, “I was a witling to start this story. All I can do is flounder around in the slush.” But posting the first half of a story online is a great motivation to push ahead finish the darn thing.

Persistence: a theme of this blog since the beginning and before: “Keep a-goin’

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