Simon and Some Other Stuff

Dated 14th September

Yesterday, I had a conversation on the phone with my youngest son, who is six years old. I know everyone says this, and that knowledge makes it no less true; kids grow too fast to be believed. He already is starting to lose his little chipmunk baby voice and sound like a regular kid. I know I harp on the subject a lot, but I have missed most of his life due to work-related travel. I won’t dwell on the sob-story. It doesn’t help anything.

Instead, I’m going to break the schedule I have given myself and talk about some news and projects.

Number one, I have decided to take advantage of Google’s option to monetize my blog. In order to drum up interest in my blog, I'm going to impose upon all my friends on Facebook to spend some of their precious time perusing this little corner of my mind on the Web, and I'm also going to beg that each of them ask each of their friends and so on and so on. Please, please, please, if you are on my blog, click some of Google's so thoughtfully provided advertisements. Aside: honestly, I say this in the hope that their Adsense algorithm produces some worthwhile ads. If it's rubbish, it's rubbish.

Number two, I have replaced Sunday's Free Write with Flash Fiction on topics from sundry sources, so I will be putting up new material weekly. The whole focus of this blog will shift to those pieces. My hope is that this will allow me a day of respite in my self-compulsory writing schedule. I find that working day in and day out on the same project tends to bring me to burnout rapidly. However, I do need to continue working on my novels in addition to whatever other flash fiction or short stories I may do. In the interest of creating some outside pressure, I'm going to post on Facebook every day my previous day’s word count, which will also be posted here. In addition to that, there will be instructions for all of my friends to verbally thrash and abuse me if I don't live up to my expectations. In order to engage my friends (and their friends and so on) on Facebook, I will be asking for story ideas. I think my blurb will be "your fiction my way" or some such nonsense.

Well, we'll see how this goes.

CL