Well that was quick.
The
last five months have absolutely flown by. For those of you that
didn't know, I spent the last five months covering the flailing St.
Louis Rams every day for the good folks over at insideSTL. Well, at
least six days a week, but you get the idea. The team went 2-14, fired
their coach, and now is knee-deep in a coaching search that has somehow
managed to raise new concerns about the team moving to L.A. Great.
At any rate, I'm off of the insideSTL beat pretty much until draft time (that's April, for you non-football fans out there),
so in the interim, I'm going to attack my white whale: writing a
complete, cogent, entertaining, thoughtful work of fiction before then.
Surprisingly enough, writing basically six days a week instilled a
little bit of discipline in me; at this point, it feels wrong to NOT
bang out a couple thousand words a day (at least). Oh, sure, I got my
"play videogames for a few days" stretch out of my system this past
week, as the old batteries got a bit drained down the stretch, but now
I'm recharged and ready to write, with a fresh sense of purpose.
Being "on the beat" also helped me refine my writing skills further.
Writing my ridiculous weekly power rankings got me back in the habit of
writing creatively and entertainingly; as outrageous as they may have
been at times, the sheer act of creating characters and following them
through a larger story arc did wonders for my fiction-writing
endeavors. Plus, I know I can crank out 5,000 words a day of (I hope)
pretty high-quality stuff when I put my mind to it, so I have a new
benchmark to shoot for in my daily endeavors.
I do have an exciting concept for a novel, and I'll share more as it
comes together, but I thought that blogging the process of writing a
novel might be a good way to keep in touch with folks during my hiatus.
So a lot of the self-improvement stuff will be cast aside for a while.
True to my former...err..."teachings(?)", I figured that the best way to
teach others about self-improvement is by chronicling my own attempts
to do so, in the hopes that you all can learn something from any
successes and failures that I have along the way. Hell, I might even
change the name of the blog--never really loved the "Superblog" moniker, so maybe I'll think of something a little more fitting for this next jag.
Blogging about writing a novel also provides me with a little bit of
accountability; I know that friends, colleagues, and even a few
strangers read this blog, so hopefully ending each day with a short blog
will help keep me focused and writing on a fairly "regular" schedule.
I'll talk a bit more about the process in upcoming posts this week, but
for now, it's important to keep me on task. If you see me around or
just want to pass some thoughts along via facebook or twitter, or just
want to ask me "how's the book coming along?", please, I not only say
"feel free to do so," but ask that you DO do so, if for no other reason
than to keep me honest. If my answer sounds like B.S., call me out on
it.
Anyway, just thought I'd start 2012 out properly, and let you all know what's going on at the moment. It's exciting as hell to really dedicate myself to an ambitious project and timetable. Thanks for reading.
D.J. Gelner covers the Rams beat for insideSTL.com, and is an aspiring author. Follow me on twitter (@djgelner) or facebook (here). E-mail me at djssuperblog@gmail.com. You can also listen to my podcast (Bottle and Cans) here.
Labels: Fiction, Work, Writing
