The Off-Topic Tuesday / Thursday – Further Developments

Here’s the skinny:

A writing career takes an enormous amount of time to create if you want it done right.  Writing a full length novel is extraordinarily difficult, to say the least.  And when you cross the finish line?  Hardly anyone will care.  You basically have to hack your way through a dangerous jungle, moving relentlessly forward with no regard for what is behind you.  You have to finish each project, try to make the most of it, then move on to the next one.  Forward, always.

This blog?  This new angle to my writing career?  It is the admission that I shall not be a shining new star in the writing community.  I’m not a break-out author; I’m not going to take anything by storm.  But I want to keep going, moving forward with my machete in hand, letting nothing stand in my way.  Not even my general lack of progress.  I refuse to quit.

So I have a new focus now: I want to continue writing, to continue growing, while also providing for my family in a meaningful fashion.  So I created this.  The Unsheathed Quill.  Here I shall bring new logs to my fire.  Podcasts, Youtube productions, Twitch streams.  The sky is the limit.  I also have dreams of doing a web-comic twice weekly on the off-writing days.  I also didn’t stop being a human being once I turned my hand to the focused creation of stories.  I still have opinions.  And the more time I spend as an author, the more I realize that writing means being a never-ending student.  You can never know enough, you can never dig too deep into a subject.  The more you learn about the various facets that you’re writing about, the more things you actually have to write about.  Your world sharpens, deepens, becomes infinitely more immersive.  I’ve started noticing more and more as reading returns to me those who have taken the time to do the necessary research for their writing, and those who just do whatever they wish, without regard for things that have already been discovered or become known.

So that brings us here, to a day where writing normally doesn’t occur.  And yet I am doing just that: writing.  I’ll have things to say on various topics.  I’ll have deep insights I’ll gain as I push forward with my career.  I’ll have other authors work to share.  That’s another part of why the Quill was born: I want to centralize some of the talent that I interact with; those souls who do not have a platform of their own but whose creations I enjoy.   I want to invite them in and give them a chance to have an audience for their work.

So we have the Story portion of the blog, and now there is the Off-Topic Tuesday / Thursday space.

We are either growing or dying, and I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet.

Expandfully,

Justin Wallace