Winter Break

Barring world-shattering events, I will not be posting for a little while.

Longtime readers will recall a little hiatus I took last July, wherein I promised I'd get something done with my writing. Oh, I wrote, all right. But not as much as I should have. When I ran up against a brick wall in my short story, I banged my head against it for a little while and then gave up.
Well, I've long had a novel incubating on a mental back burner. Unlike the short story, I have a pretty good idea where it's going. Nothing so tangible as an outline--I don't do outlines--but a sort of mental map.
I've doubled its length in the last few days, editing as I go, and it's now sitting at nearly eleven thousand words. What's more, I've barely started...and this time that's a good thing. My mind is fully engaged with teasing out little nuggets of story (I just had a delicious plot twist exfoliate itself in the shower this morning) and I don't think this one's going to peter out on me.
I've resolved to treat this story the way I used to treat my daily diary back when I was a teenager. Back then, it was imperative that I wrote something every day.
That's a start, anyway, and marks a hell of a lot more discipline than I've brought to bear so far. The truth is, writing's the only real ticket I've got out of a dead-end career, and if it takes a little work to cash it, so be it.

I'm not abandoning the Breadbin, but I expect it'll go down to a once-weekly thing for a little while. Have fun and play fair, folks.