Welcome to my writing blog

Readers of my "Follow Your Bliss" blog may know that I have dreamed of, and even dabbled at, writing a novel. I have the basics of the plot in my head. Have done some loose character sketches, written a few scenes, etc. But mostly all I've done is daydream and talk about it. A very common condition for wanna-be novelists, I hear.

This week, I picked up a book called "The Weekend Novelist," written by Robert J. Ray. It was highly recommended to me by a colleague at work. I had been dabbling with a writing manual called "The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing," but as simple as its structure seemed to be, I just couldn't fit my novel into the "Plan"...my characters didn't want to be so tightly labelled as Marshall wanted them to be, and trying to figure out how to make them fit HIS idea of character structure was really bogging me down (ironic, as the working title of my book is "The Bog.")

So, I picked up The Weekend Novelist, and while it doesn't seem to be as structured, step-by-step as the Marshall Plan, it does approach the task in a way that I think I can work with more constructively. It calls for a lot of "extra" writing too...the kind of writing that will never wind up in the book itself, but which is supposed to be very helpful in developing the book, the characters, the plot, etc.

It's also the type of writing that could be very suitable for blogging, so I've decided to start this new blog where I can collect my practice writing and put down my thoughts and feelings on the nature and work of writing and being a writer. Kind of an online notebook, the type of which The Weekend Novelist says I will be filling many. We'll see if this is the most advantageous place for me to do my practices and notekeeping. No doubt some of it will wind up in real paper notebooks.

As a prelude to beginning this new blog, I took a quiz by Morgan Hawke, another writer who is a subscriber of the Erotica Readers & Writers Association writers' mailing list. It claimed to tell you what kind of novel you should write, based on your answers to a dozen or so questions about how you feel about plot, character, action, sex, etc. My results were:



This is the quiz, if you want to take it:
What Kind of Novel Should I Write?
brought to you by Quizilla

Quelle cool, non? :-)

That's actually very accurate. The novel I have conceived - "The Bog" - is technically going to be a "contemporary horror". But it will have generous doses of erotica in it, and hopefully very sexy undertones will run through the whole book...making it one of those books that reviewers might someday call "a sexy thriller."