Big Announcement, Big Changes

October 4th is my two-year anniversary writing this blog. My first post talked about a class I had just finished at Grub Street. Two years later I'm still talking about taking classes and writing and books and publishing. For the most part. Which is great. And I plan to continue writing about writing, but just not on this blog. 

Why keep a blog? It is standard publishing-business wisdom that a writer trying to make it in the cut-throat lit world must keep an active blog, keeping a high profile up and running continuously. So, that's what I've been doing. And I love keeping a blog, but feel I've covered, in two years, about all I can say about my little world of literary without starting to get redundant.

And if we're talking audience, I've averaged about 20 views a day for a good long time, and don't see that changing. So switching it up at this point isn't going to break a lot of lit hearts. Besides, as my regular readers probably know, I post over at Beyond the Margins once every couple of weeks. I'm lucky and grateful to be a part of that blog and am finding more often than not I save my tastiest morsels for that outlet.

But I love Unreliable Narrator, and am glad I started it when I did and have kept it going, because it's a wonderful feeling to look back over two year's worth of posts and see the bulk of writing that continues to accumulate. I had no idea I could turn the fiction side of me off so cleanly, and push aside my technical writer brain, for these brief spells. It's been a challenge to write in these chunked blocks of essays.

Unreliable Narrator has never been about the daily life of a writer. I've never felt comfortable spilling my guts on an internationally accessible forum. I did not use UN to talk closely about my current writing projects ("Dear UN, today really sucked because chapter 3 is not going well. I'm having trouble with Claude, my new talking horse character, and also I can't seem to describe how maple syrup flows, or how one chainsaws a branch. I wonder if I should write in third person instead of first? That flashback I wrote last week about Claude's bad time with the nuns back in parochial school is taking on a life of its own, and could be the start of a screenplay or a pilot."), although there are writing blogs that have that focus, which is well and good.

But I am of the mind that after you start talking to everyone you know about your current project, the air starts getting let out of the proverbial first-draft tires, and soon you can't help thinking what everyone is thinking about your writing. I'd rather go off in a corner and write for a few years, then start showing it to people, and then start worrying about what people think about it.

So. I'm trying something different with UN. Starting in a couple days the format will change, temporarily. For one year I will be writing about a topic other than literature (for the most part, there will be days when I will just have to share some writer/book/pub thing with y'all). What's that other thing? I'll announce it soon. While I whip up a tasty post about why I want to write about that topic, and the concept behind the switch. Yes, there's a concept, an idea. Or as they say in the publishing world, a platform. My blog is soon to have a platform.