Story Time

Someday, if I live long enough, I promise to reward long-time visitors to this foolish little blog with the news that one form of my writing or another, all of which have been on display here, has turned into a gold mine.

On the other hand, I may well disappear, literally and figuratively, long before then.

Here I write and write, sharing certain portions of a life in real-time, taking care to shield you from the extremes that only trusted intimacy can handle. You can rightly assume that my true life is both better and worse, by orders of magnitude, than I am able to reveal here.

What I yearn to do is share enough that my trials and my successes at least offer some comfort or inspiration for you, in whatever you are going through.

It has always been this way, since I launched this blog six years ago yesterday. You can go back into the archives and check (although I have since removed many posts from public view for reasons of others' privacy) to see that I have held clear to the notion that whatever I might be able to share from my own life has been posted here in an effort to help you deal with yours.

There is no other reason for this blog to exist. We are in this together.

I've been working on a novel. This is not news. But today, I finally got enough free time to review the synopsis, the character descriptions and the first dozen chapters, and I liked what I read.

Now I need someone to show this work to, someone I can trust. Once I get some feedback, I will move on to the next step along the long road toward publication. If anyone reading these words has a suggestion, I am "all ears," as my Dad used to say.

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Writing, alone among the arts, inspires a power that seems to know no boundaries. As I have been profiling self-published authors lately, I have been struck at how shocked they are when they suddenly realize that thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of others respond to their stories by paying to hear more.

Clearly, I must graduate from here to there. To do so I may have to modify the way I communicate, and some may not like how that turns out. But if it proves true that the stories I have to tell can resonate with others beyond the relatively few who visit here, I owe it to them to (and to my kids) to figure this out.

Stay tuned.

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