No, that's not really why I haven't been blogging.
I stopped writing here because I decided to take on some completely different writing projects. In the span of 72 days I wrote a 52,000-word novel and published it with Kindle Direct, Barnes & Noble PubIt, and on a site called Smashwords, where you can download ebooks in almost every "e" format you can think of (except for DOS).
It's an idea I've had for a commercial fiction novel for many years and finally decided to put it all on paper and see what happened. The results were good.
I really wasn't sure I had what it takes to write long-form fiction. I have these stories floating around in my head and I have a notebook full of ideas and character profiles, but I had never set out to complete any of them. Making the switch from writing non-fiction was kind of bumpy, but once I got the hang of it I just couldn't stop.
Over the last six weeks or so I've published three novelettes, each of them around 12,000 words. Yes, they're short (approximately 40 printed pages each), but I had fun writing them and people seem to enjoy reading them.
I've had these four ebooks on the market for about six weeks now -- the most recent one has been live on the site for less than a week -- and just the other night I broke 200 sales.
That may not seem like a lot, but it's certainly more than I had expected in that time frame when I set out on this experiment.
If you're thinking of writing something to publish on those outlets, the best piece of advice I can give you is this: Write a book called "OPRAH WINFREY PRESENTS - HARRY POTTER MARRIES LADY GAGA" or something like that.
But seriously, one thing I highly recommend if you're wanting to write fiction is this: read screenplays of movies you love. It's the best thing I did in preparation for writing. Screenplays are invaluable on two fronts. First, you learn a lot about pacing. Second, you learn how to write dialogue. Novels and short stories can get away with wooden dialogue much of the time, but when an actor recites lines from a screenplay, it has to sound real or the movie fails. It's a constant learning process, but reading lots of movie scripts helps me immensely.
I have three more novelettes in the works and then I'll take some time away from that stuff to finish the "real" novel I set out to write late last year.
The four books I mentioned were written strictly to make money. That's it. I didn't set out to make art or literature. They're not even things I would want my real name associated with, because they're not in the same genre I plan to publish under my name, which also won't be art or literature, but it's what I really want to write.
So I used a pen-name for these other projects. I did it purely for financial reasons, but along the way I also know it's good practice. I think I'm becoming a better writer while putting these stories in print.
The only book with my name on it is the one linked on the right side of this page, which is selling really well these days, after not much action the first few months. Currently, the ranking is down, but here's what it looked like a couple of weeks ago.
Top 100 in its category! (Barely.)
So that's what I've been up to for the last however many months. At some point in July, the "real" novel I'm writing will be available and I'll post about it here. Probably incessantly.