A New Direction With This Blog...

There's a new(-ish) trend on the Internet: Give away knowledge FREE.

This blog started out on this principle, me writing articles sharing the things I have learned so that you can save the time and money I've invested gaining this knowledge and just get to writing..

And that's still the goal of this blog..

But I want to try something a bit more ambitious: I am going to share with you the writing of my first novel..

I am determined to publish my first novel in 2014, even if I have to self-publish. Twenty years is entirely too long to wait for "Opportunity" or "Fate" to present itself and kick my career off. I have a day job (well...overnight job) that eats up the majority of my time and energy, and the only hope I have of jumping careers to writing is to get my work out there and let people discover that I tell the types of stories they enjoy reading. That means writing a first novel that (whether published by a publishing house or e-published) no one will read because no one knows who I am, then writing a second novel and getting that out there, then writing a third novel, etc. until something happens and someone discovers that this guy named Ray Jay Edwards is writing these novels that are pretty fun to read, and they tell their friends, etc..

Jim Butcher refers to writing as the part-time job that doesn't pay anything for years and years. It's time for me to get to work..

And while I'm doing that, I can share my experiences with you, Theoretical Reader, as they happen. You can learn from my strategies and missteps..

I have streamlined my process quite a bit from earlier posts. (Well...sort of.).

My first step was to try to figure out exactly what my "genre" is. So I'll talk about that process next post, tell you where I went wrong, and then how I landed on "my genre"..

So check back soon.