Long Time No See; Everything Old is New Again

So yeah. I changed back from Dynamic Views. As I was doing my end-of-year review, one of the things I wasn't as happy with as I could have been is the fact that I drifted away from this blog. Generally speaking I put myself out there much less this past year. I didn't submit very many stories, and I didn't revise and sub the several novel manuscripts I'd planned to at least dip into.

In terms of writing, it was a very introspective year. I took a course or two. I thought about what I do and how I do it. I wrote a quarter millions words, much of them taken up by two novel manuscripts. That went well: I think I finally started to get how to plot a long form work this year, without things going all crazy and somebody going on a weird killing spree or the whole thing ending up looking like one of those movies from the 1980s where the only way to resolve things was to enter some weird, abstract place of terror and delight because all your problems are ultimately in your mind. (See Drop Dead Fred for a prime example. Seriously, that template for resolving plots is completely lodged in my imagination.)

A lot of my energy went into teaching tai chi and qigong. I developed a couple of courses and ran more workshops and worked on making my classes even more awesome. I also focused a lot more on basic organization of our household, setting up some routines, and working on my basic writing habits - i.e., figuring out when are the best times to do writing, and how to find more time if I have to skip a day for other stuff. In other words, how does it all fit into my life?

One of the things I realized is that I come here, to the blog space, as much to connect with you guys as I do to post crap about me. I benefit quite a bit more from seeing what you're up to than I do from beaking off abut what I'm up to. Although I liked the way Dynamic Views looked, the interface was never as smooth as it should have been, and lacked the same gadgets that Blogger's simpler templates have: specifically, the blogroll widget. I know some people think they're messy, but I love the little reminders that tell me when you guys have posted recently. I know that Blogger does this on the back end too, but like to keep track of some of you on the front end.

The fact that that sounded dirty to me means this post is done. I won't promise to post more frequently. We all know how that goes! But now that I can see how you all are doing, I promise I'll drop by more often.

Happy 2014!