A good stopping place

When I was a kid and my mother wanted to pry me away from whatever I was reading, she used to ask me in her gentle way to set down the book, "when you reach a good stopping place."

I think I've reached a good stopping place for this blog. I will have a new novel coming out soon, Bride of the Living Dead, and I need to stop looking in the rear view mirror and focus on what's right in front of me.

I started writing this blog in late December of 2005, and it's been fun, self-indulgent and educational. I learned, as usual, by doing things wrong--or at least making my own choices, which may look wrong even when they are right for me!

Lesson one, obscure blog titles are probably not the way to go!

Lesson two, complicated concepts like looking back 30 years compared with now..... What can I say? I'm a novelist, I like a lot of layers!

Although I continued my orange notebook listing books I read until December of 1982, I feel okay about leaving my 30-year-old, 30-years-ago self in 1979. That was when my life began to change and deepen in many ways. My mother died in 1980 and a few months later I met and began to live with the man I would marry. I published my first novel in 1988.

Now here's the scary part. I'm not really giving up blogging. I will keep in touch in the more immediate, unpolished (eek!) form of Live Journal. Simple concept, simple title lynnemurray.livejournal.com

Usually I hide behind material that I've revised and flea-combed for months or, at the very least, days. When Laurie Edison suggested Live Journal, my first thought was: "Fine, for her, she writes about making jewelry, that's colorful, concrete, three-dimensional and intriguing."

Myself, I sit in a trance spinning webs of words. At least spiders get out and slaughter the occasional housefly, but I leave housefly capture to the cats. That's pretty much my life. Who wants to read that? The jury's out on who will read it. But I did get the idea to write a bit about writing, getting Bride ready to go to press, doing revisions on my next (Vampire) book, forging ahead on my ongoing (Ghost) manuscript, book promotion (a major obsession) and all that jazz.

I've been doing guest blogs for Body Impolitic--the next one will be on writing fat fiction. Laurie and Debbie have invited me to blog more frequently. I shall, and I will put up links here when I do.

Thank you for hanging out with me on memory lane! I will leave the archives of this blog where they are and simply post the forwarding address for new stuff. Feel free to visit me in the present day. My new motto is

word salad, word soup, words on fire!

Live large and prosper!

Lynne