New Journey, New Blog.

I just finished my first residency on the way to receiving my Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Fairfrield University, and it seems my fellow MFA'ers are overwhelmingly fond of Blogger. In an effort to keep up with them and also let them know how I'm doing in the writing department, I've decided to create this blog. It'll be just for my struggles and (hopefully a few) triumphs as I work towards my first completed manuscript.

I've never even tried to write a novel before. The closest thing would be a murder mystery I wrote in sixth grade: The Murders of (on?) Mirror Lake. Damn, I was proud of that thing. Sure, it was totally predictable (spoiler alert: the next-door neighbor who seems really nice...isn't! Dum dum dum!), but it had chapters. Somehow, my eleven-year-old self was perfectly comfortable in long fiction. Since then, however, I've been strictly short, if not flash. I went in to the residency thinking I'd do a collection of short stories. But as I got feedback from my workshops, all I heard was "we need MORE from this story." I realized that what I thought were short stories all these years were actually 10-page summaries of novels. This leaves much to be desired, as you can imagine.

So, I'm off to Novel Land, a country I know little to nothing about. But if my sixth-grade, Catholic school self wasn't afraid, why should I be now?

Guess I should go try to write a few pages on my actual manuscript now that I've blown an hour creating this thing. Cheers!