This is Day One

This is Day One

This is Day One of the rest of my life. This is the first day of my journey into the writing profession.

Yesterday I left my job at ______. It wasn't really my decision unfortunately. It was a lot of fun working there, and ______ is one of the best companies in the world. I redacted the name of the company because I don't want to end up in the New York Times like some other people I know. It just didn't work out for me. I think I'm just too much of an independent person. I had trouble just doing whatever they wanted me to do, conforming to whatever kind of person they expected me to be. I'm just me. I just do things the way I do things. I don't to want to be anything other than what I've been trying to be lately... (thanks Gavin DeGraw)

So what am I lately? 

I can't stop writing. I think about my stories all the time, some times to the point of distraction. I have all these characters running through my head, talking to me, arguing and fighting with each other. I can keep writing and writing, and eventually a whole book comes out. The last two Novembers I wrote 63K and 70K in 30 days. That comes to 2.1K and 2.3K words/day. Now if I were to write all day instead of just nights and weekends, I could easily crank out 4-5K/day. Of course during NaNoWriMo I wrote much faster than I normally will since that's the point of the exercise, so now I could probably do 3-4K/day but of a higher quality.

I did this once before. I left a company in 1995 (my choice) and decided to try writing. It turned out that I couldn't focus. I felt lonely most of the time because all my friends worked during the day and there was no one to have lunch with etc. I just couldn't focus on writing. The difference this time is a couple things. All the running I do really helps me focus on my stories. I literally do most of my writing when I'm running, and when I'm sitting at the computer I just write down the ideas. Also I have a family now so I don't feel so isolated. The internet will also hopefully help me maintain contact. I plan on joining some writing groups and hopefully will meet with other writers during the week.

Over the next week or so I'm going to stop using this blog as my daily blog and start a new one over at blog.writerunner.com (not up yet). I'll be deleting a lot of the posts including the blogvels and some other writing I have up here. This blog will focus solely on my progress on Dawn's Rise once I start trying to shop it. I will have a pointer over on the other blog so you can see when there are new posts here.

Well wish me luck on my career. I will be supplementing my income by doing some computer consulting but my main focus over the next few months will be writing and selling. Thanks for all your support!