Would You Like to Read a Novel?

I've been thinking of taking my blog in a different direction.  Part of the reason I started it was to stimulate my creative-writing process and return to achieving one of the most ambitious goals on my bucket list...writing a novel.  Alas, I seem to have found a way to write about anything except a novel.  I haven't done any serious work on it in over a year.

So my idea is simple; to write my novel here.  Not all in one post, of course...but perhaps at the rate of a chapter every week or two.  About a third of it is already written (some 20,000 words), including the first four chapters, parts of the climax, and the development of a flashback story (told throughout the novel) for one of characters.

Hopefully I won't write myself into a corner on the way.  I feel pretty confident about the story even though there are a lot of smaller details I haven't worked out yet.  Much of the outine and specific setting I had to develop during the initial writing phases.  I'm not always so linear and was writing sequences from throughout the story.  When a good idea hits, you just want to write it down!  Worry about working it in later.  Eventually that catches up with you, and you need a roadmap that is going to join all these great ideas and mark the waypoints for your characters to follow, both physically and emotionally.  I've done a lot of that work already and now I think it's time for a more linear approach to get this thing done.  If it reads well, I'll create some audience anticipation to inspire me to the end.  And, hey, if I actually got it published someday, that would be cool too.

Oh, I'll still tell you about any adventures I take, and update you with that icky stuff from time to time.  But things are slowing down here in the desert summer heat and I really don't have any plans except for swimming and sweating out the next few months.