It's probably more than a little ironic that in my search for Colorado gold, the more fool's gold I find poking through the tailings piles, the more I conclude that I'm on the right path. Hopefully this is not a metaphor for my life.
Some consider the goal of writing for a living (particularly fiction) to be similarly misguided. And I won't deny that to date it's still fool's gold for me too--but shiny, wonderful fool's gold nonetheless...
The blog is a good outlet and I have neglected it recently in pursuit of that other gold, but I wanted to take a minute to explain myself. Last month, 75% of my traffic to the blog came from direct addresses--so, many thanks to those of you who bookmarked me and keep coming back for more of this rambling. I'm down 10% in that category now, probably because I dropped the blog like a hot potato 10 days ago and haven't posted a new entry since. There are a couple of reasons for this, and you can expect the pattern to continue for a little while--possibly for a long while until the wild edible plants start poking up their spring shoots.
The first reason is exactly that--the edible plants up here around the house are gone, for the most part. I've done a little collecting of new plants at lower elevation--and I will blog about that when I get around to preparing and sampling them--but there are maybe two or three entries left on the backburner and then I'm probably going to close up the wild edible plants shop until the end of winter.
The second reason for my negligence is that for a period of approximately seven days I chose to work on the second draft of my Mama Lilia book--my first novel, the one I wrote last year for NaNoWriMo--during my early morning prime writing hours. Last year, after writing it, I couldn't look at it at all. Was it too autobiographical? I wondered. (My friend Heather says that most authors' first books are.) And, true to her pronouncement, much of the story takes place in settings I know from my own past, and a few of the characters are loosely based--or at least share some characteristics with--people in my life. So, it sat on the shelf. Once or twice I pulled it out and read parts to Gregg before sticking it back on the shelf in disgust.
Anyway, Gregg gave me Stephen King's On Writing for my birthday, which I will review in detail later when I finally finish it. To summarize, however, the first half of the book is autobiographical. It tells the story of King's childhood up through his first story submissions to science fiction magazines and eventually the wildly successful sale of his first book, Carrie. The second half of the book is devoted to the craft of writing itself. King talks about "the toolbox" of writing, including vocabulary, grammar, avoiding colloquialisms, and other standard writing conventions. I've owned many books geared towards getting over writer's block or releasing the writer within and frankly I've never been able get through them. I don't know what it is about King's book--maybe the swearing or the otherwise colorful language--but On Writing has not only kept my interest, it's motivated me to put it down and turn back to my own writing. So that's where I've been for the past week or so--editing and rewriting my Mama Lilia story. I'm about half way through it and I find that it's not that bad. A first book, yes. But it could have been a lot worse.
One of the things that struck me so far about On Writing is King's dedication to standard writing conventions. There is one part where he rails against the passive voice, which, coincidentally, I read immediately prior to a writing job rejecting me based upon my use of the passive voice in the sample I submitted. I have to laugh at myself because at age 35, I keep having these epiphanies that I think everyone else must realize at a young age. Standards--it makes sense to know them! I spent 10 years successfully self-employed as a writer (a PR writer, but a writer nonetheless) without ever once re-familiarizing myself with the standards for good writing. I just wrote what I thought sounded good and left it at that. So, um, thanks Stephen King...and may the re-education begin!
As if life really wanted to drive this point home for me, the concept of standards made another appearance recently as I prepare for a community college class on typography and digital layout that I've been invited to teach in the spring (after much pestering on my part). Again, like the writing, I spent 10 years of my life laying out publications for clients without ever once familiarizing myself with the principles of good design. God love me. In preparation for the course, then--and this is another reason I have been remiss in my daily blog writing--I have been studying textbooks on the topics. As it turns out, I find these topics extremely fascinating! It also turns out--thankfully--that I did a fairly decent job deducing and applying the principles of effective design to my own publications.
Still, standards--who would have thought? Everyone but me, probably. And it makes me wonder if maybe I did find gold after all? I suppose only time will tell.
I've had the late "standards" epiphany about 10 times now, each in a different area - programming, music comp, project management, parenting, etc. I think you're going about it the right way because textbooks are not fascinating the first time around.