In 2015, I had my most productive year of writing. I wrote with some frequency on a variety of topics. Overall, I published 64 posts to this blog. It felt fantastic to accomplish that! However, I haven’t been as active on my blog in the last few months. What happened?

The truth is, I have been working on my writing even more regularly – most days. The difference is that my focus is different and the format is not blog posts. The result being that publicly visible portions don’t yet exist. It feels a little strange to go from sharing writings regularly to not doing so for months. I wanted to share a little about what I’m working on.

At the end of November, I began writing a novel. I’m calling it “The Long Signal”, and the genre is science fiction. I so far have six chapters and over 17,000 words in the first rough draft. I’m excited about this project and look forward to continuing it! I reached the end of the 6th chapter and decided to work for a while on a tangential project.

This blog has been titled “Thoughts of an Eaten Sun” since I began it in 2009. For a long time, I’ve had an idea of the story behind that phrase. It’s a myth and more in the fantasy genre. I have some brainstormings that are three and a half years old now, but I’d never written anything substantial for it. Now seems like the perfect time to bring it into existence!

My plan is to tie the novel and the myth together. To do that, I wanted to flesh out the myth of “Thoughts of an Eaten Sun”. At the end of December, I began writing it. I recently finished its first draft, and it stands at about 21,000 words. The next step will be to do some revision, editing, and additional writing. I plan to self-publish the myth, which will be a fun and interesting project of its own. And once it’s completed, I’ll move focus back to “The Long Signal”.

“Thoughts of an Eaten Sun” will share some similarities to “The Mechanism Collection” in that they are both mythologies in the same universe. “The Long Signal” is another story in that universe and is set in a more modern time.

My near-daily act of writing over the last couple months has helped spawn even more ideas. I’ve taken many notes and am excited to explore them in the future. Both Zach and Karla have been fantastic with their feedback, so I wanted to be sure to thank both of them.

I’m plenty surprised that I’ve written 38,000 words for these two projects since the end of November. But the encouragement and support of those close to me, along with a regular habit, have helped make writing something I really look forward to.

I’ll lose some of the words-per-day traceability when I go to edit “Thoughts of an Eaten Sun”, but I hope to keep to my goal of at least 300 words or 30 minutes of work on writings most days. Additionally, I have taken days off from writing here and there, but I don’t beat myself up for it. Balance is important.

I look forward to sharing these works with others as I make more progress on them.