My New Website's Up!

Hi Everyone,

For the past ten years, I've done my own website. The results were pretty decent if I say so myself, but last year, I decided I wanted to give myself the luxury of having a profi do it, and this year (early this year), I hired the team at AuthorBytes. For various reasons, finding artwork being the main one, it took several months to get the site up. Well, it's finally there. Check it out, okay?

The site comes up just in time for NaNoWriMo. Pat mentioned in a post earlier this week. I am an unabashed NaNo fan. This will be my third, or is it fourth, NaNo. In the first one, I managed to write the 50,000 manuscript. It became Darkness and the Devil Behind Me. The second NaNo I signed up for, but never really worked at. Too many things were going on. The third one I finished also. This fourth one, I'm totally committed to.

I find that the writing marathon that is NaNo helps me outrun my inner critic. So many times writers try to edit themselves as they write. These are two conflicting mindsets and the result can be a form of creative paralysis, sometimes known as writer's block. The fun thing about NaNo is that there's a release from the often self-imposed requirement that the first draft be good. We all know, under such a writing deadline, that the first draft will most likely be horrible -- and so we're sometimes pleasantly surprised to see that we've not only finished the target number, but have also come up with a fairly decent story. The story might not even be finished -- that doesn't matter. What matters is the word count.

Can you imagine? Not having to worry about quality or perfection? It's an incredible idea for a perfectionist who fusses over every line. And it's a wonderful excercise for people who write one or two or maybe even three chapters, and then spend months, sometimes years, polishing those same chapters, over and over again, and wonder why it is they can't finish the book. NaNo forces you to move beyond the first chapters. It forces you to write to the point of exhaustion -- and it's fun, because you're not doing it alone. You're doing it with hundreds of thousands of other nutcases around the world. :-)

So if you're thinking about writing, join NaNo. I hang out in the Mystery Genre Forum. You can reach me there, or stop by my brand new website and drop me a note. I'd love to hear from you.

Persia