Neglected Blog?

In talking to Cousin Grace last week, I became aware that regular readers, such as she, have noted with curiosity that I'm not tending this blog as I used to. And, although I have in mind a couple of good stories coming up, that's totally true. So I owe you an explanation.

When I took early retirement and we moved back to the South, this blog became my creative outlet. I had written in a wide variety of specialties for all my career -- newspaper reporting, speech writing, corporate communications -- internal & external publications, magazine articles and even a couple of freelanced handbooks. And then -- boom -- I'm a retiree. So I created the blog.

That worked for a good while, and I enjoyed the challenge of finding new material to entertain a surprisingly diverse group of regular readers. But I had to do some soul searching. Although in the past, I'd written some poetry and even had some published, I have always wanted to write fiction. That's what I'm working on now. I've been studying short story writing and was invited to join a writers' group. I have four completed stories under my belt and I'm working on my fifth. My goal is to produce a collection and seek publication. I need 10-12 good stories for that. My short stories are related in that they all take place in the same location and some characters appear in more than one story.

I'm pretty excited about my progress. Creating hopefully good fiction isn't easy, but it sure feels good. It took all this time for me to kick myself into gear to undertake this project. Procrastination is the purest form of perfectionism. As long as I wasn't writing fiction, I couldn't possibly fail, right?

So, now when you notice that I haven't posted anything new on the blog, you'll know that I'm either studying someone else's work or pushing through my own. For my part, I'll hope that you're cheering me on.