I can’t believe I’ve let seven months go by without keeping up with this blog. I’ll briefly sum up what’s happened this year and then get to the theme of today: Roller Derby, Grand Cayman Island, more derby, Writers’ Guild stuff, Texas, more derby, moving, all the derbies, and finally a Workshop.

After six years I have finally stepped down from the Board of my local writers’ guild. It was a volunteer position, but I often felt like it was a job and I took my responsibilities seriously. Now I find myself with quite a bit of free time and that leads me to a problem –

I have no more excuses to not write.

For years I’ve been telling myself that my dream, nay my purpose is to write and that if only I had enough time, I’d pump out the next great American novel in no time at all.

And sure, along the way I’ve managed to write a few dozen poems and short stories, including seven or eight children’s books under my pen name Billie Bang, which I’ve illustrated and self-published. But what I want is to write a whole novel where I can really create a character that will stick with people. That might even change people.

But I have no idea how to do this.

I honestly don’t know who this character is, what they’ll be doing, or even what genre I want to write in. I’ve always felt like Literary Fiction would be my thing, but a lot of small, local publishers deal in a lot of horror or fantasy, so it might be easier to be published if I go with one of those genres, but how do I do horror in a way that’s not just graphically violent, but psychologically terrifying a la Stephen King’s Misery? That’s really the only horror I’m interested in, but you know what I’m actually good at writing? Humor. And humor is hard, so that kind of narrows the competition (and also I feel like the world can always use more humor), so maybe I should go with that. But my heart also yearns to connect with children, so I also want to write some epic quest like The Neverending Story.

Thus, I sit here and blog until it’s time to stand up, stretch my legs, then mosey off to the kitchen and find something to eat. I can’t procrastinate too much longer, though. NaNoWriMo is upon us and I think I may actually try to participate again. Which means I need to narrow down my idea asap. Wish me luck and let me know if you have any advice for what you do when you know you want to write, but you don’t know what you want to write about!