Not really sure if this is worth a celebration but this is the Fifth Anniversary of this blog. Five years ago to the day, I published my First Post on this blog site and I've been doing one every week since. While this has never had a huge following, I'm doing it as much for myself as anyone else. I certainly hope there are life lessons and writing lessons included here, I started doing this to keep myself honest.
A lot of people call themselves writers but don't always actually practice the craft. I wanted to show myself, and the world, that I was actually writing. I've sat down here every Sunday since to re-examine myself and to think about what I have or have not accomplished in the past seven days.
I'm still pretty much working on the same three projects that I was five years ago: writing mystery novels, writing film reviews and trying to get a comic book off the ground. Let's begin with writing mystery novels, which I had hoped would be, at some point, my main focus. I've worked on several in the past five years and I've gone through spats of querying as well as writing and editing.
At present, I have six queries out for Broken People, a novel I've rewritten while doing this blog. As I've written before, I don't want to have already hit up every agent I could find as I like to prolong the torture, I guess. Querying is perhaps my least favorite part of the writing process. I'm not someone who likes to wait and that's pretty much all you do after sending your query letter is wait, oftentimes in vain. Most of the time, you're supposed to realize on your own that a particular agent isn't interested as they provide no guidelines on getting back to you. I'm using six weeks unless otherwise noted, as the cut-off. The drag is you oftentimes never know why the agent rejected you. Is it the story? The query letter? Did they even get to it? I mean you want to improve but without feedback, it's hard to know your deficiencies.
Working on my rewrite for The Runaway, though I didn't get much done this past week. Other projects and a bit of ennui. I have been thinking about it and I will work on the next chapter this week.
Still waiting to hear back from the editor on Familiar Stranger. We made a connection and I was led to believe he would be actually editing it or parts of it in August. I promised to refrain from bugging him until September, which is now! Hopefully, my patience will be rewarded.
Trophy Unlocked, Paul's review blog that I write for, is coming up on nine years and 1000 reviews, though it will be sometime next year before the latter milestone will be achieved. Most weeks, I work on a review with this week being no exception. In addition to publishing one this week, The African Queen, I wrote another one for another Humphrey Bogart film, All Through the Night (1942). Not sure when that one will see the light of day but its always better to have ones in reserve rather than trying to pump one out every week.
And, of course, there is still Powers Squared, which has so far released seven issues. Issues 8 and 9, as well as 10 and 11, are done but we're wanting to do a Kickstarter to hopefully alleviate costs and grow interest. We keep pushing it off trying to get all the pieces together and set but we should get it going next month.
While there is not that much actual writing week to week with Powers Squared, it certainly has kept me busy. Over the past year, in addition to looking at every page that comes from artist, colorist, and letterer, I've also developed a website, started a weekly newsletter, doing a weekly video on YouTube and this past Friday did the first On the Air with Powers Squared Podcast with Paul for PodBean.com. You can't say we're not trying.
Five years have been fun and I hope the next five are both fun and profitable. Keep writing.
Each week in the past five years has been different and I hope others who read this either appreciate the struggle and are learning from reading these posts.
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