I've had an active ~presence~ on the internet since I was a wee thing, and spent my early online years trawling this endless series of tubes trying to find any scrap of information I could pertaining to James Cameron's 1997 masterpiece
Titanic. One website stands out fondly in my memory; circa 2002, it featured several flashing gifs, midi files, and a giant background picture of poor Leonardo diCaprio floating away into the Atlantic while Kate Winslet looks helplessly on. Now I know better; now I'm after
Pretty Little Liars.
But the point of this little ramble down memory lane is simply this: in all my e-travels, I've never really blogged for public consumption. Which is odd, when you think about it; I've called myself a writer for as long as I've been online, and yet it never occured to me to have a blog written specifically for people to read. Oh, I've had plenty of blogs; but they ran more along the lines of online diaries, the kind you set on fire when you reread them as an adult, shuddering at how woeful you were because your mom wouldn't let you stay up late to watch
The X-Files. Fortunately, the handy delete button most websites come with make burning your early diaries that much easier, and more environmentally conscious. No trees died for
this angst! But, circling back 'round to the point of this entry, that still leaves me without any kind of written record that I write For The People instead of for myself. I love my e-diaries, but the fact is, they're written for me, and that's not a good habit to be in when you want to write for public consumption. Not unless you want to be [insert cheap shot at popular female novelist here].
So: I have a blog! A proper-type blog with a nice layout and my face attached (sure it's my face hugging a dalek, but still: face) and a promise to you, my readers. As I embark on my quest to finish and publish a YA novel on my own, in the footsteps of so many great YA authors who went before me, I vow to you that not only will I hold myself accountable via daily updates on my progress, I will also update you on my life in general at least once a day. I cannot promise that I will do this without fail, but I can promise to let you kick my virtual ass if I don't. After all, I'm entering into a contract with you- with this blog,
you get to demand content of
me. So over the course of this long strange trip of writing a novel, we are going to count on each other. Whatever we have at the end- a terrible first draft and 350 days' worth of unintelligible entries- we can't say we didn't try.
