I’ve made it to my ninth writing on this journey. With a mixture of stories, opinions, and introductions I feel like it’s been a success thus far. I’ve easily hit my 750 daily word count with yesterday’s piece going over 1,000 words. The key is that I’m writing which if I’m not makes it impossible to improve.

Yesterday I wrote my first story where I included character dialog. My first few stories were more point of view story telling pieces and weren’t about dialog. While I’ve read dialog thousands of times from a variety of authors it’s been years since I’ve written it myself. It was far smoother for me to write background story lines rather than dialog but once I got into the flow it went fairly well.

I know it was a bit rough around the edges but this blog isn’t about taking the time to perfect each and every piece. It’s about writing every day and improving each and every time. It may small improvement that aren’t obvious at first but the more I write and the more I read about writing the more fluid my writing should become.

Because I haven’t had the opportunity to read as much since I’m not writing more I haven’t studied as much as I’d like. I have a few books on my short list though that if you have opinions or better options I’d love to hear about them.

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
• The Elements of Style
• How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
• Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose
• On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft

I’m still on the lookout for a good reference and practical book on grammar and sentence structure. Ideally it’d be in electronic form if possible which limits most textbooks. If you can recommend anything please drop me a comment.

My process thus far has been to write in the evenings after the kids are down. I haven’t yet been back on the train so I haven’t had the opportunity to test my writing there. In the evening I often start around 8 pm and don’t finish until 10 or 11 pm. This is usually a mixture of random conversations with my wife and writing so it’s not exactly uninterrupted time. I’m hoping the dedicated time on the train will open some free evening time to read and study more.

Finally I thought I’d write a bit about the stories and other random topics I’ve chosen. I don’t have any long running story lines planned yet. At some point I think it would be fun to have one or two moving story lines but I don’t want to put that pressure on myself yet. I’d rather write what comes to mind each time I pull up iA Writer and just let the words flow.

As you’ve likely already noticed I’m a huge fan of science fiction and most of my stories will likely come from that or a fantasy angle. I went through a period where I read some modern day survival fiction and I’ve recently been reading WOOL which is a futuristic post apocalyptic series of books, similar but different. I find it easier to write about modern survival topics but enjoy futuristic ones more. I think the future fiction requires much more planning and character development to pull the reader in and make them feel like part of the story. The modern fiction stories can be build from more relevant and relatable everyday topics and locations which while easier to write about can also be a bit tedious.

Since this is my first writing blog I don’t really know what to expect in terms of readership. My prior blogs had several hundred regular readers but the topics were quite different. A number of my readers come from a tight knit group of fellow bloggers linking to or commenting on my blog. I also have a lot of twitter and Facebook followers as well. On this blog I’m starting from ground zero but my goal isn’t to get a huge number of readers. I would however like a few readers who can give feedback on my writing or share ideas with me. Because of this I recently joined the Goodreads forums and have shared a few links to my blog there. If anyone can recommend any other good literary forums to join I’d appreciate it.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

Word Count: 750