Welcome

Good afternoon, and welcome to my blog! 

You'll notice that it's my first post.  You may also know that this post is going up during NaNoWriMo, which means I am taking on a new writing project at the same time I am wrangling with writing a 50,000 word novel in one month.  Yes, I realize this is insane.  No, I am not copy-pasting the blog entries into my novel to pad my word count.  (Although I did briefly consider it.  After all, one of my characters is a writer, so surely he needs a blog too!)

I've been writing for years.  I'm one of those people that kept notebooks in middle school, then moved on to a word processing program on my Commodore 64, then promptly either lost or destroyed all of it at the end of high school during a fit of senioritis.  College happened, then grad school -- two degrees that had very little to do with anything literary -- and I began writing less and less while I struggled with my academic demands.

Now things have come full circle, and for the last year or so, I've been writing fiction again.  This time, however, I'm not doing it tucked away in a corner of my basement.  I swear I'll be more social and more open with my work this time, because I have a feeling that's what it will take to make me a better writer.  So, I signed up for NaNo, joined a local writing group, signed up for Twitter, and I'm "coming out" as a writer here, on this blog, in the hopes that I can join all the great conversations about writing that I've been lurking in for the past year.

This is just the start of a writer's journey, and I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with it.  Along the way, I will probably muse about my own writing, ask questions, give research tips (in my other life, I do a lot of research), review books I'm reading, and hopefully keep all whining to a minimum.  If you have any comments, feel free to post them, because I'm always interested in what you have to say. 

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!

Alissa