I’ll start off by letting you all in on a big thing.  I have written thousands of words in the last few months.  Some of them are very cleverly put together.  Some of them are put together as if the dictionary had the stomach flu, but I’ll fix that later.  But… BUT…If I’m writing all these words, WHERE ARE THEY?!?  Right?  And why am I writing about writing when I said I wasn’t going to do that?

I’m not publishing anything because I am writing a novel.  Given that I am also caring for Things One and Two full-time, this is being accomplished in the three and a half hours a week that they are both in preschool at the same time.  It *is* being accomplished, though.  As I dig my way through Chapter 3, one stolen prison dining hall teaspoon at a time, I believe it’s actually going to make it all the way to Chapter 12.  It’s a fantasy novel.  I’m not at liberty to go into detail, because the idea is…well…novel.  I don’t want to spill the beans until I actually have the thing in hand.  It’s outlined, timelined, and I know what the two follow-up books would be in major plot strokes.  I love the main characters.  I think fantasy readers will, too.  I can’t even say it’s “insert famous book”-like.  It’s new.  It’ll be interesting as long as I just let it be what it needs to be.

Given that I have the opportunity to take a wonderful idea and fully realize it (at least to the extent of my capability), I’m putting the blog on official hiatus.  I’ll post a thingy here and there when the mood strikes me, but I need to reserve those three hours a week to work on the novel.  At the rate I’m going, I expect to have a first draft in about a year and a half from when I started writing.  If I can speed that up, I will, but hey….that really isn’t that long.  I’ll leave the blog open, and if something strikes me funny, I’ll share it.  I probably won’t be doing any of the long pictures and humor posts for a while, though–while I love those, they take a lot of time.  It takes me hours and hours to sound quite that slap-dash, and even more time to carefully plan and stage those most professional pictures.

So… I’m not really writing about writing.  I’m writing about how glad I am that I can just say, “Not this year, honey,” to the blog without impacting my financial outlook.  If there’s someone who is disappointed that they won’t see more of the humor pieces…I hope you’ll like the novel.  There’s plenty of wry humor in it so far.

I also wanted to say how thankful I am for this blog.  I was encouraged to do this by several friends, one in particular, and it made me think that writing was something I wanted to make time for.   That opened the door to the bigger possibilities… I think if I hadn’t already been writing, I would have let the idea for the novel wither off into the ether.  For everyone who is following me, or has liked or commented on something–thanks, man.  You’re the best.  I also know that you’ll understand why I am choosing to spend my limited time where I am.

Light a candle for me every Thursday and Friday between 9:00AM and 10:45AM PST, excluding holidays and teacher inservice days.  That’s when my Martha Stewart lifestyle gets put on hold while I live the dream.