Adventures in Writing

Posted by Ironspike on Feb 1, 2011 in General | 0 comments

Weather is weird here is Texas. Today, Feb. 1^st its freezing rain with a chance of 1-4 inches of snow by tonight. What is interesting is just 3 days ago we had a high of 80 degrees. Go figure.

I haven’t seen the Swahili kids next door in some time….not sure what’s up there.

What else to report – not much.

I got the Amazon Kindle for Christmas. I’ve wanted one of these things too. Not because I’m such an avid reader either. Over the years I’ve traveled a lot with my job which meant long periods of boredom. Sitting hours in airports, airplanes, taxies, client sites, and in hotel rooms with absolutely nothing to do – is not uncommon for the average consultant. I exhausted the internet. Reading get’s so …. Mundane.

I started to write and draw.

 Then just write. I wrote a short story or two then moved on into works that had 50-60 pages of material. However, I’d lose some here and there during job transfers or drive failures. I didn’t really care it was just a way for me to pass the time.

I had no intention of selling or showing anyone what I wrote. Wasn’t looking for a book deal or publisher any of that.  I’m a realistic, I can put my ideas and thoughts to paper but not in the format or sentence structure that most publishers would be happy with.

That was until I wrote a book that I really thought people might be interested in. Your perspective changes as a writer when ‘you think’ that folks might like your shit. Up until this point I always made an assumption my stuff sucked. But what if…just what if… it didn’t?

I decided that maybe I needed to ‘educate’ myself on ‘writing’. I bought some books and read a lot of online articles on creative writing, short stories, how to write novels, etc.

What I found humorous was that here I had a lot of material I’ve vomited up – most people considered that the hard part. Yet, what I considered hard was the writing format that others found easy.

After looking around I knew it would be almost a futile effort for me to get a publisher.  It was not that I couldn’t but having a family and full time job – I made the assumption that a self publishing route would be the path of least resistance. I wasn’t out to make a fortune – just to get my material out to the public.

I looked at a few options and it seemed that Amazon’s Self Publishing was the way to go. That meant what I would publish would eventually end up in Kindle format.

So I wanted Kindle so I could proof my material.

I’ll log more on my kindle and writing adventures as it continues.