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The Long Road Ahead

The last couple of months have been incredibly busy. The release of The Fiddler’s Gun and the Christmas season at the Rabbit Room kept me ragged and tired for the month of December, and January has been filled with the rigors and long hours of my day job where I’m away from home and often too tired at the end of the day to get my mind in the right place for serious writing.

With the arrival of February, there’s an end in sight. I’ll be back home in Nashville soon and hope to have a few weeks, if not a month or so, to really buckle down get some work done. Fiddler’s Green, currently at around 50,000 words, is about half-written. With my typical writing goal of 1000-1500 words a day that means I’ve still got well-over a month of non-stop, butt-in-chair work to do just to get it all down and ready for rewrites, revisions, and edits. My hope is to put it in your hands by Christmas so I really need to get busy. I might have to bump that word goal up into the 2,000 neighborhood.

Experience has taught me that the absolute enemy of a writer is inconsistency. Writing, and more accurately, long form prose, requires a schedule. It requires the writer to put words on the page on a regular and predictable basis. It’s like the famous quote: “I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at 9am sharp.” It’s a labor that relies on a well-exercised muscle and when that muscle falls into atrophy it’s no quick task to bring it back up to operating level. For the past months, I’ve rarely put the writing muscles to use and now that I’m sitting here trying to flex them again, it shows.

The words you are reading right now are, in some ways, little more than procrastination. In other ways, however, they are the stretch before the marathon.

When I get back to Nashville, I intend to run. Time to write. And I’m looking forward to it. The road ahead leads through some dark and beautiful country and the miles may leave my feet blistered and swollen. Wish me well; Fin’s gone far astray and I’m anxious to bring her home.

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