Web woes...

So my sister and I had this brilliant idea that we would start a blog where we could talk to each other and then post it for the world to see called The Slog (for sisters' blog). Okay, we know only our mom will ever look at it, but when you live 2,000 miles apart and haven't lived together for--let's see--more years than I car to admit, you have to find creative ways to stay in touch. So this has lead me on a wild internet chase to procure a domain, find a host and actually get the site working. I have done two of the three, but getting the site working is where I’m running into major trouble. I really need to find a man who could love a fat girl and spend his free time managing my Web site.

On to other things…

I’m getting ready to go back to school. Yes, at 26 I am going back to finish my one semester I never bothered to finish to obtain a degree I should have cared more about four years ago. But as I get ready to become a full-time student, I have realized I don’t want to leave my “reasonable adult” lifestyle behind. I have too many projects and friends and interests and responsibilities to just dump them all to go back to school. So instead I am prolonging the inevitable and dividing my time between the real world and school. I am so going to screw myself trying to do this. But I don’t see another way!

The real reason for this blog…

I wanted to start this blog because I want to be a writer. I’m not talking about this little childhood fantasy about writing a book someday and becoming this famous author. No, I mean it. I really want to write a book. And I have this great idea.

I’ve written about 10 books in my lifetime. The first was in second grade where these siblings are camping and fall into this wicked witch’s evil lair but manage to escape by using sheer intelligence and skills no teenagers truly possess. The second was a cheesy book in seventh/eight grade where a girl goes back in time to the Civil War to save a plantation and I don’t know what else (and yes, I know who ridiculous this sounds coming from a city girl from Chicago). The next summer’s story was about a girl who goes back in time to pioneer days to travel to the Wild West. (Are we seeing a theme emerge?) Then in high school there was a fantasy about a girl trapped in time only to be unfrozen a thousand years later to save her people. (Okay, maybe that one had potential if I has any concept of how to write fantasy.) Then there was a story about a First Lady who gets kidnapped by terrorists and dies, finding herself in the Elysian Fields where heroes go when they die. Then there was another brief interlude with fantasy in my sophomore year when I was writing a book about where fairy godmothers come from, and if I was Meg Cabot, I might have been able to pull that one off.

And then I hit inspiration. I moved to Louisiana where story ideas started coming out of the woodwork. I found out my family used to own a plantation on the Mississippi River just after the Civil War, and after learning a lot more about the post-Civil War civil rights movement, I started writing. Then I met a woman who told the most amazing stories about living on the Bayou during the Great Depression. Then there was the Sunshine Bridge, and the hanging gardens, and the aboveground graveyards and the Golf Coast oil industry and sulfur deltas and so much more. The story ideas wouldn’t stop.

Then I got sucked into writing nonfiction for a living. After writing for several newspapers and attempting to break into the magazine industry, I put fiction aside for far too long. Then I stopped writing nonfiction and began desperately missing writing in general. So I joined a writers group to get me back on track with my nonfiction, but the fiction bug had bit again.

So for the past two months, I’ve been writing--really writing--fiction again. And I want to have a manuscript ready by the end of summer. So this blog is here to chronicle my life as an aspiring author. I’ve always wondered how writers become writers, and now you will hopefully be a part of my journey there. It might take years, or I might be the next Stephenie Meyer and get published within months, but I will be a writer.

And by the way, no stealing any of those story ideas. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up using them someday.