First Draft “Purples”

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG?

I feel a bit as if I should come up with a host of “dog-ate-my-homework” excuses around not blogging for four months. Though all I’m going to offer is that I’d rather be writing and blogging, and time being what it has been with my teaching job at the university this semester, it’s been all I can do to keep working on my fiction.

Still, I’d love to hear from others on what you get out of blogging. I’ve been advised that it’s one of those necessary activities authors need to do to fulfill the requirements of that nasty “M” word—Marketing. I’m married to someone who does marketing for a living. He likes to blog. It gives him a forum to share his political views and promote his thinking about business and ethics and how it relates to his vision for a better world.

I think that as a fiction writer, my vision is more metaphorical, or, at least, I’m more comfortable expressing it that way. I am one of those writers who don’t keep a journal—oh, occasionally I scribble some words to work out a feeling, or explore an issue through poetry, but I have no great need to create a chronicle of my mundane thoughts and activities. And not surprisingly, when we travel, it is my husband who takes all the pictures. I’m happy to have them, but don’t feel the need for something that tangible, preferring instead to remember the fragments as they reappear in my brain from time to time, often transformed into something I can use in my fiction.

However, one of the things I have liked about blogging is the community—the people I’ve met through LJ and Facebook, MyNESCBWI and other sites. And I’ve missed that, so rather than kvetching, I’m going to try blogging one more time. And I’d like to intersperse my own musings with interviews of other YA and middle grade authors, particularly if you have a book coming out—so please do contact me.