Taking up Writing

Wow, it has been a long time since I have written to this blog. Sorry about that. I have had a lot of thinking and re-thinking to do. My career on the web started from a system administration and programming angle, but over the years the web has become more and more clearly a publishing medium and it has become more and more clear to me that trying to be a one-person publishing-company is sure to be a case of biting off more than I can chew.

Accordingly I have been thinking more and more about the writing - the authoring - part of it. For years now I have followed with interest various groups who have been taking a web-business approach, which has more and more become a matter of promoting and advertising. I have watched that with interest but truly my heart has never really been in the promoting/advertising side of things. So lately I have been thinking long and hard about sheer writing.

For a long time now i have ad the opportunity to write articles about almost anything I wished to, purely to make some money. I have not gone into that though because to me it has seemed to much like a kind of web-spam. Simply churning out "copy" does nto appeal to me. Sure there might be a bit of money in it but is it really so different from having a script churn out "copy" to attract search engines?

I recently discovered that some people whom I know here in Halifax are into writing and publishing. Real books, even poetry. Later today I hope to be seeing them and will inquire a little into that world. I am actually excited about the idea of getting back into writing, I have written before but not really for publication yet. One of the things I plan to do is review some of my earlier works and map out some options of what exactly to write about. i actually have an entire roleplaying world, D'ydii, with years and years of week by week calendars of the activities of various players' characters, and a whole world of maps. Most of that material is out at my country house in Sheet Harbour, but that jut gives me yet another incentive to get back in touch with that too-long neglected residence.
I hope to start putting together some web-pages about D'ydii soon, if only to get some of what I remember about its various nations and famous people written down. Although the material out at the country house would help a lot with that as I have a lot of written material about it out there.

I have been back into the Kingdoms mult-user text-mode roleplaying game ("Multi User Dungeon") quite a lot lately too, developing a few different characters exploring some of the "professions" they offer. In fact I have been spending too much time at that.

I have also recently read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" and "Quicksilver", which my father sent me. They are huge books but have been a good read. "Quicksilver" is just the first book of a trilogy, wow, huge. I shudder to think how much sheer writing goes into a project like that, let alone the research involved! I do not aspire to writing anything on the scale of those! The publishing folk that I hope to talk to like books based right here in Halifax so I have actually been toying with the idea of writing about a kind of local school of magic. Yes, I know, it is kind of an obvious attempt to capitalise on the popularity of the Harry Potter books. Another option of course is to finally get around to completing my most popular unfinished work, "The Faery Queen's Knickers"...

-MarkM-