A Write Full Year

This time of the year, when most families in America gather to express how grateful they are for the many blessings in their lives, (even if such gratitude only displays itself in exuberant application to the manifold foods at hand) I wanted to take the time to post about how grateful I am for such a wonderful year.

This year, a little over six months ago, I started blogging, and I’m very thankful to my fellow blogger, Christina Wehner, for introducing me to this wonderful realm. It’s let me meet all of you and your wonderful websites, a few of which I’ve listed on my “Recommended Sites.” (If you aren’t on there, don’t be discouraged. I haven’t had the chance to meet everyone in the bloggosphere yet. 🙂 )

It’s also been a year full of learning. I’ve discovered how to use tags, been stretched in crafting titles, and explored the self-publishing arena and had my novella released.

And I’ve done a lot of novel writing: four of them, at five drafts a’piece, each one at least a 100,000 words long. (Which, if every draft changes and adds 25,000 words, comes to over 500,000 words written in a year, not counting posts, and drafts of other novels yet to be finished.) As a mother of two young kids, I had days when I thought I’d never get a chance to write a thing. It just shows how much you can do when you try, when you take the time and set it aside, ignoring distractions and keeping at it.

So thank you, all of you who read this. Thank you for your inspiration and encouragement, your comments and your “likes” and most especially, for following me, repeatedly wanting to hear what I have to say.

Thank you to my Beta readers, who put up with all the version and rewrites. Thank you to all you writers out there, who show me how I can do things better (special thanks to Ryan Lanz, whose blog is just about the best writing resource I have ever encountered).

And, above all, thank you to my friends and family, who put up with me when I get the far-off, distracted look that says I’m plotting, who field questions about how to make a basement explode, and what time period has a war for succession in which castles change sides rapidly, and what kind of electronics we had in the seventies. I appreciate all of you so much, and I’m so blessed to have so much support in being a writer.