Blog Fasting and Novel Ideas

Sometimes you have to figure out what’s best for you. And sometimes you simply have to do what you do best.

I secretly made a New Year’s Resolution to not blog anything for a month. Not even write a blog to post later. I went so far as to not think about what I was going to blog about when I restarted in February. There were times I was tempted to disregard my fast and post a random tidbit or recipe (of which there are a few I’d really love to share soon!) but decided against it. Why would I stop blogging for an entire month? Quite simply, it was taking away from the entire reason I started blogging in the first place, which was a daily writing exercise to get my creative juices flowing towards young adult fiction or sci-fi or children’s books. Allow me to explain this perturbed troll logic.

Writing is writing, right? Apparently not so much. I’m not exactly certain as to when it happened, but somewhere along the way I realized that writing a daily blog actually sucked away any real creativity that I normally would have put towards storylines and characters. I mean, this isn’t the first venture I had into writing non-fiction, but it is the first time I was writing from my own perspective. I’ve written articles on important figures in history (such as Oliver Otis Howard and Sequoyah to name a couple) for a magazine about famous Howards. However, these are a bit different and more like writing research papers than, say, a novel. All of these different styles take different skills and when I was trying to force myself to write a blog about cooking and cleaning and quilting and chicken-keeping to entice my brain to write about murder and mayhem and drama and comedy, it just wasn’t going to happen.

To counteract the trap I got myself into, I decided the only way out was a fast. I had to put this blog on hold to get back to my roots. It was time to return to the fictional town of Ravenwood where a majority of my books for children, teens and adults are set. It was time for me to stop waiting for something to happen and start doing something to make it happen. It was time for me to start thinking about what I really want to be when I grow up… and that is a writer.