Thoughts

I’m just getting over the flu that felt like a cold with runny nose and sneezing on Thursday, then progressed to severe headache and muscle aches on Friday.  I spent most of that day in bed alternately sleeping and reading, dreaming strange dreams and thinking.  It’s occurred to me before that sometimes sickness is an opportunity to review my current situation and make changes.  Perhaps it’s that mind body connection, and the body says all right I’m going to knock you out for a while so you can’t do anything but lie there.

Originally I started this blog because a friend encouraged me to do it.  I hadn’t ever done one before, hadn’t read many.  I did some research, decided I would go ahead and write a sort of personal diary on topics that interested me.  Which I’ve done for a couple of months now.

However, flu dreams and re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, plus a recent spate of being very busy has made me rethink not only this blog but what’s dissatisfying about my life right now.  Actually the discontent has been going on for a while.

I left a full time decent paying job about 8 years ago to devote more time to my personal writing, taking on contract work to help pay the bills.  That’s been exactly what I wanted in the main.  I’ve had short stories published in the past in magazines and anthologies, broadcast on radio, won a few prizes and awards, and I expected that after a few years of concentrated writing I’d be able to get a book published.  It hasn’t worked out that way, but writing still remains a central part of my life, and writing after all is about communicating with other people.  A writer needs an audience.

In my early years as a writer ‘vanity publishing’ now called ‘self-publishing’ was frowned upon.  If you were a ‘real writer’ you would eventually find a publisher went the popular wisdom, especially if you’d had publications in anthologies and magazines.  Well, times have changed.  It’s a lot more difficult to get published (and I’ve heard this from published writers as well as publishers) these days.  Some small publishers have liked my work but said it needed editing and they can’t afford to hire editors.  So I recently paid an editor myself to look at one of my manuscripts, and I’ve investigated the process and costs of self publishing.

On the positive side, times have changed.  Anyone can write a blog, set up a web site, do a U Tube video, find ways to share their work.

So I’ve decided rather than continue to use this blog as a personal diary, next month I’ll begin posting my writing.  I’ll start with published work, shorter pieces perhaps.  I don’t know how many words can be posted at one time on a blog, so at times I may have to break a piece into sections.  At any rate, I hope those of you who’ve been following Serimuse will continue, and please tell your friends.  I hope you’ll enjoy the stories.