Shy

I’ve been feeling shy about my blog lately. I’m not really sure why. There’s not really a specific event that triggered this reluctance to share my life on the internet, more like a gradual neglect that’s grown steadier and steadier.

At first, over the winter, I’d didn’t feel like I really had that much to say and I was working really hard doing actual paid work and writing the book I hope to get published and playing music and recording an album. (Did I mention that by the way? Miners Creek recorded an album, Ulysses on the Highway,  in November in December. It released back in April. You can download it on iTunes or CD baby or you can go to our Square Store and purchase a physical copy.)

Then spring came and there was still work and writing and music and now rather than recording the band was playing shows. We even went down to Massachusetts back in May to play at Bluegrass on the Bogs. We’ve been invited back to play next year. In June we went to the Jenny Brook Bluegrass Festival to compete in the Band Showcase and placed 2nd, which was a really great experience. Both those things I thought about blogging about, but never got around to doing and now it’s months past and I can’t remember quite what I was going to say or how I felt about the experiences.

This summer we’ve played more shows and not just Famers Markets and Bean Hole Suppers (though we’ve done those too), we’re actually getting hired and paid to perform. And the more I perform and the more positive feedback I get, the more I think, I could do this for the rest of my life. I don’t want to lose this.

But then there’s the other side of my creativity, my fantasy novel. I’m in the second draft of the third version of this book. I started the first version when I was fourteen, that’s eight years that I’ve been working on this story. Not continuously though, I took a couple years off to work on something else, before deciding that I wasn’t yet at the skill level I needed to be at to pull off what I wanted to do with that project. So I went back to what I considered my “practice novel”. I wrote a complete draft of that in nine months. That draft ended up being 212,000 words (roughly 750 pages). It was a disaster, but it was complete. It had a beginning, a middle, an end. It had interesting characters for me to work with. I did a good amount of my world building in that draft. Rather than try to edit that monstrosity of a draft, I started from scratch, taking the elements from the original version that I liked and translating them into a different, sleeker plot. That was a much better version, but I’d set it further along in the timeline and by the time I was a third of the way through the draft I realized that more than half of what I was writing was set in flashbacks. So I decided to abort that draft and start over again, this time starting from the beginning of the story and getting rid of all those pesky flashbacks. Now I’m about 70 pages away from being done with the 2nd draft of that version. In November, I’m going to try and sell it. I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m exuberant. I keep having to sit myself down and just write so that any self-sabotaging tendencies don’t raise their heads and get in the way of my goals.

And on top of writing and music, I have a job. No wonder I haven’t been blogging. I’ll try and make an effort to update more often, but just so you know, that’s what’s been going on with me lately. Lot’s of music, lot’s of words.

I hope this made some sort of sense. If there are typos let me know, I’ll go back and fix them later. I’m just trying to cannonball back into the blogging world and if I go back and proofread I may not ever get around to pressing publish.

Thank you for Reading.