Here is what I’m thinking:

In the months since I finished writing The Terror of Tijuana, my work effort has been, if I’m being honest, hit or miss at best. This is not all straight laziness and negligence, but those are certainly big components. There were other elements in play, and everything seemed to come together and conspire to build the perfect… well, not storm I guess. I would equate that more with activity. No, it built the perfect doldrums.

Doldrums are nasty. Just ask Milo from The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (one of my all-time favorite books). It just seems calm at first, but the next thing you know you’re all bogged down and barely moving. This is where I have been.

But it is not where I intend to stay.

To be fair to myself, I have been writing. A novel is cooking, and I’ve been writing a good deal of poetry. But even this has gotten less than my full attention.

What I need to do is to get some sort of words somewhere, every single day. There’s just no other way to go if you want to want to think of yourself as a writer.

So you should begin to see some things happening more frequently.

The Blogs

This author’s blog has been very fulfilling for me over the past few years, but many of you may not know that I have three other blogs languishing in cyber-slog. I’ve probably mentioned Things to Laugh About in the confines of this blog once or twice. It was this collection of ridiculousness that really got me back into the swing of writing at all and it deserves far more love than I’ve shown it.

But in addition to that moldy oldie, I also have a blog dedicated to music, called Music: Always Inside, (the title meant to indicate that no matter what I’m doing, at some layer of my consciousness there is music playing), and my newest, a poetry blog called Loose Lips, Sunken Ships.

Again, the mere existence of these blogs seems to scream profane words and nasty names at me, their creator and protector. The music blog, even with my honest passion for the topic, has seen only a handful of posts, and none since July of 2018. The poetry blog has not really solidified in a way that makes me happy, but with the amount of time I’ve been spending actually writing poetry lately, it needs to be made right.

It seems to me that this is wasted resources, and I’ve decided that they are a rope to lead me out of the doldrums and back into a regular schedule of productive writing.

I’m planning to write regularly scheduled posts in all four blogs, starting, obviously, with this one, which will feature a new entry on every other Tuesday, starting, obviously, with this one. The Thursday of the same week will see a post in the music blog.

In the alternate weeks I will post something to the humor blog on Wednesdays and will round it out with an entry of some sort on the poetry blog on Fridays.

Keeping to that schedule should at least keep my fingers moving on the keyboard.

Short Fiction

A lot of interesting ideas which feel like they would work well as short stories have been finding their way into my head lately, and although these haven’t yet found their way out of my head and onto the computer, I am hoping to work on some soon. This won’t be any kind of regular thing, I don’t imagine, but again, whatever I can get written keeps me writing.

I’ll have to come up with some novel ways to get these into your hands, dear readers.

The Newsletter

My email newsletter was started at a time of much greater activity and has grown quiet and cool in recent months. This critter is a little trickier, as I have learned that finding just the right schedule for emails is like ballet in a minefield. But I feel pretty comfortable that I can send one per month, towards the end of the frame. I’m likely to include links to anything that’s been posted or released since the last edition, and hopefully some subscriber-worthy exclusive content. If you’re not subscribed, you should be. Click the link above to sign up.

The Hub

Finally, I intend to use my Facebook Reader’s Group and author page to announce whenever anything is made available, so if you haven’t joined those yet, now would be a good time.

So, That’s That

I have committed to doing this. Now let’s see if I can honor my own damn promise to myself!