Welcome

I’ve been resisting starting a writer blog for some time. This is not because I’ve never blogged before. Rather, it’s because I have.

I’m a certified teacher, but I eventually left the full-time workforce and began homeschooling my three kids. It’s a big transition for anyone, but as a teacher I found it vaguely adulterous. It took me a long time to stop feeling like I was terminally out of school for a doctor’s appointment.

It was very similar to being a new author. I knew who I was and what I was trying to accomplish, but I lacked many of the external trappings that previously made work feel like…well, legitimate work. I had no bosses, co-workers, performance reviews, work clothes, or…oh yeah, paychecks.

Fortunately, homeschoolers have the same sorts of online communities that have been so successful at connecting writers. I dove in. I networked. I blogged.

Except a funny thing happened. Remember the old Tolstoy saw? “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Well, the more we adjusted, and the more smoothly homeschooling went for us, the less I found to blog about.

Then I found fiction again. I NaNo’ed…and trunked it. Then I NaNo’ed again, and this time, it was worth editing. Editing a novel until I was fully satisfied with it was an entirely new process. So was querying. Even when I found my writer tribe on twitter (and it’s still growing), I felt no urge to blog. There always seemed to be someone saying what I was thinking, as well as I thought I could say it. So I kept on writing fiction, and I left blogging alone.

Over time, though, I’ve found that I do have opinions. I’ve gained experience. I may well have something to offer.

Then my wonderful, darling Pitch Wars mentor, Maude love her, described my web presence as “slight”. Since I tweet, pin and tumbl, I took her comment as a sign that she couldn’t find a large enough sample of words, not just by me, but about me—about being a writer.

So. Here I am. Time will tell. Welcome to my blog.