New Year, New Direction

The end of 2011 left a lot of things up in the air for me, not the least of which was my blog. Since my last post, things have gotten borderline idiotic; new baby arrived, dealing with a blown disc in my back, having surgery for the blown disc in my back, recovering from surgery (over Christmas break no less), Christmas, and now an infant who refuses to sleep her nights.

One of the odd benefits to the sleep deprivation (oh, there’s a lot of it too), is a seemingly teeming imagination coming to fruition; I’ve got story ideas flying onto the pages in outline form. One of the other benefits my convalescence provides is a six-week period of respite from work. This essentially forced me to go out and buy a number of books (physical and e-book format). The result is about five books read, including two spectacular anthologies that have really kick-started the drive to write, the drive to create.

With the first book under final editing before being sent out for agent review and the second well-outlined and partly written, I thought it apropos to start flexing my writing in other directions as well. Looking through the net at short story anthologies led me to really see the interest in this previously overlooked format. I never really sought to write short stories, mostly because the ideas for Ihr’Vessen and the Ochra Cycle were too epic, too complex to fit into 2,500 to 13,000 words. OF course when I looked back at my writing, it has mostly been short stories, whether completely original or RPG-based fan fiction – this was particularly true with the RIFTS RPG setting. Short stories were suddenly a place I wanted to revisit, the concept like a welcome reunion with an old friend.

Then the ideas started flowing, many of which were geared towards short stories that could either lead into longer, novel-potential projects, or support the plot lines already planned for the Ochra Cycle. I am now well and truly hooked, which is a joy unlike anything I can think of within the scope of my writing. This of course leads to an interesting quandary. I now have to switch the blog away from a strictly Ihr’Vessen focus to include my other projects. As such I’m re-launching the blog with an expanded scope, resolved on writing in general to allow me to cover all my projects.