My Year In Writing 2014 Plus

It wasn't THE year in my writing life, but it was about the best one yet.

The Okefenokee Heritage Center Writer's Guild was stronger than ever. with fun, well-attended meetings, the launching of Poetry Nights, and a successful inaugural year for our Writing Contest.  We had over fifty entries, and some high quality winners.  Most of these winners are posted on The Strait Line - check them out!

I attended a great Writer's Conference in Wayne County, sponsored by Leslie Crane and the Wayne Arts Council, and spent quality time with award-winning writer Jack McDevitt.  If you like science fiction, and/or good writing, you need to check his books out!  My conversations with him gave me encouragement and focus for the rest of the year.

The Strait Line hit a record number of page views in November, well over 20,000.  It has gone back down some the last two months, but is still substantially more than what it was.  Politics, religion and family continue to draw the most page views.  My poetry has dried up, but maybe that will come back in 2016.  You never know with poetry.  I do miss having advertising.  It didn't bring in a lot of money, but it did help create the illusion that I was actually making money off writing.

One of the most exciting writing achievements of 2014, albeit starting late into the year, was that I will be having newspaper columns appear periodically in two newspapers, The Blackshear Times and Effingham Now.  I'm not sure how often they'll use the columns (The Blackshear Times have ran two so far), but I am submitting a new to them each week.  Hopefully, this will increase my name recognition and reading base.

I tried some to market a few short stories and poems, but I had trouble staying consistent with it, and I had no luck.  My focus shifted to concentrating on my two novel projects.  Crowley Stories: Swamp's Edge is now about two thirds finished, getting to the murder mystery that lay at the center of my original concept for the stories.

A few months ago, I stopped writing on the Crowley Stories, and instead focused exclusive on The History of the Trap.  It is with great pride that I am able to tell you that is now complete through a second edit!  It is currently going through a final review by a small group of writing/reading enthusiasts, and then I hope to ready it for publication!  I look forward to seeing it in print (and/or as an ebook), but right now, I am just happy that I actually finished a whole book project, one in excess of 85,000 words.

In the coming year, my plan is to finalize The History of The Trap and market it for someone else to publish, and failing that, to self-publish.  As unlikely as it may be, I can't come this far and not at least see if I can get it published.

I will be going back to the Crowley Stories and see if I can't finish that up.  This will give me a second book to market during the year.  Once the Crowley Stories are finished, I will exclusively work on short stories.  They will cover a variety of topics and genres.   Inspired by conversations with Jack McDevitt, I do hope to write some science fiction stories that are more optimistic in nature, to contrast with the dystopian thrust of much of current science fiction.

I continue to work with the Okefenokee Writer's Guild, and look forward to helping with the second Writer's Contest, with the hopes of making it bigger and better than ever.

For those of you who read what I write, and have followed me here or on Wattpad, I appreciate your support and kindness mare than you can imagine.  For those of you don't....well, you don't even know I just wrote this, do you?

Thank you all so much!  I will continue to strive to improve, and be as entertaining as a possum twirling plates on a stick in the middle of I-75.

Something like that.