With the blog closing in on 1000 days of posts (just 162 to go!) and the release of The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard (read reviews here, here, and here), it seemed like a good time to reflect on writing, and to discuss some writing projects I have in the works.

When I revived the blog on WordPress in late 2018, I never intended to write daily.  I’d maintained a Monday-Wednesday-Friday posting schedule on the Blogspot blog, which I shifted over to WordPress on 1 June 2018.  I kept that pace up briefly, but when school resumed I left the blog dormant until late December 2018, and after three days of consecutive posting by happenstance, WordPress informed me I was on a three-day “streak.”

That caught my attention.  At that point, I decided to write daily for the month of January 2019.  It seemed like a fun a challenge, and I figured it would help build an audience and give me something constructive to do during the slowest month of the year.

After that, I thought, “Eh, why not go to fifty?”  From there, 100 didn’t look too difficult.

Once I hit 100, I decided to try for a year.

Now the blog has taken on a life of its own.  I keep thinking 1000 posts will be a good time to give the blog a rest and to reduce my output, but who knows if I’ll be able to stop?

Regardless, it’s been a wonderful experience.  I’ve made a number of great blogger buddies.  Their encouragement—not to mention their writing—has enriched my life significantly.  There is wisdom to be found, even on a place as vast and fallen as the Internet.  Good friends make that apparent, and the chaff disposal easier.

It’s gradually turned profitable, too:  my SubscribeStar page isn’t robust enough yet to pay my bills, but it certainly helps defray some of the costs related to maintaining the blog.  Like every writer, I dream of opportunities to be paid for my writing, and SubscribeStar offers a small means of living that dream.

Writing every day has offered many other benefits.  Though it is at times stressful—especially when I have to write something every day—it’s also quite therapeutic.  I often look forward to writing, especially if I have time to do so in the morning, when the coffee is hottest and my mind is sharpest.  I also enjoy writing late at night—the time I am writing this post—during the second wind I tend to get after about 8 or 9 PM.  Going to bed with a fresh post scheduled always gives a bit of a peace of mind.

The process of daily writing holds one other important benefit:  it forces that fleeting nymph Inspirado to flutter her gossamer wings into my brain hole.  I’m constantly brainstorming ideas for posts, jotting them down in a notebook, or writing a brief stem with a prompt in WordPress, saving it as a draft to complete later.  While I mostly write non-fiction here, that’s beginning to inspire some fiction ideas as well.

Which brings me to some writing projects I have on the horizon.  Right now, here is what I am cooking up:

• The first volume of paperback and Kindle versions of Sunday Doodles.  Sunday Doodles are a $5 and up SubscribeStar exclusive, and I have a little north of seventy installments written so far.  Sunday Doodles, Volume I will feature the first fifty of these installments.  Because of high printing costs, I’ll have to offer the book in black-and-white (the Kindle version will be in full-color, I believe), but since these are doodles using a blue or black pen on notebook paper (for the most part), the quality won’t suffer too much.  I look to have this project wrapped up sometime in May 2021.
• A collection of new short stories.  I have been brainstorming a number of short story ideas since releasing Inspector Gerard.  I’m quite interested in ghost stories, weird fiction, sci-fi, and the like, and have a number of story concepts I want to explore.  I’m hoping to work on this project this summer, but hope to start on it a bit sooner.1
• An edited collection of various stories—and a play—I wrote back in high school and college.  Like Inspector Gerard, this volume should be pretty easy to put together.  Some of these stories are quite funny, and the play—Schnitzel aus Aiken—is absurd.

I’m toying with a few other ideas, but these are the main ones I’m kicking around at the moment.  Inspector Gerard and my recent round of Spring Break Short Story Recommendations really has me pumped to return to writing fiction again.

I’ll post updates on all of these projects on the blog here, but you’ll know when they’re available immediately if you follow my author page on Amazon.

Thanks again for your support!

—TPP