April 11, 2014

J Is For Journey

My journey as writer and a blogger got its start through a most unusual way: I got laid off from work.

Seriously.

Short version: In 2003, Connecticut was then, as it is now, hip deep in a recession. With budget deficit dropping faster than a porn star's pants, the governor chose to play hardball by laying almost 3,000 state workers, of which I was one of them. And no, I didn't decide to start writing then. I was pretty much suffering from shell shock for roughly six months, and the next year and a half after that was spent trying to recover from the financial blow.

By late 2005, I hit a few personal hiccups in the road and those hiccups ultimately started me on the road to writing. The blogging factor didn't kick in until 2008, when I took up a friend's suggestion (see the letter "C" for further details) to move over to the blog world. So basically, I've been writing since 2006, seriously since 2010, and blogging since 2008.

Addendum to the short version: It definitely wasn't all peaches and creme de minthe by any stretch of the imagination. By last count, I have churned out some six dozen short stories of mediocre goodness, a half dozen solid short stories, of which two were published and three self published, one good novel, one average novella, three good novellas and about a half dozen longish short stories of dubious quality. As for the blogging, I have  created/maintained 6 blogs, two of which are still functioning, one which has become a living archives, one permanently closed and two others on semi-hiatus. All told I written roughly 1200 combined posts, most of which are between one and three pages in length (which on average means roughly 250 to 750 words per post ). If you're a number junkie like me, you can extrapolate that out to a rough minimum of 300,000 nouns/verbs/adverbs/adjectives of all kind have been written for posterity.

And that my friends, is something to be proud of.

(c) 2014 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved.

5 comments:

  1. It is indeed! It's funny how being laid off leads so many people into artistic pursuits. I think it's therapeutic to start with - but then it takes on its own life and purpose.
    Good luck with your writing!
    Jemima
    #TeamDamyanti
    Blogging from Alpha to Zulu in April

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  2. That is a lot of words when you add them all up.

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  3. Jemima Pett: Thanks for stopping by.

    It was the seed to be sure, but other things cropped up that ultimately pushed me to pursue writing as a form of cheap therapy.

    Alex: Absolutely.

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  4. Peaches and creme de minthe don't sound like they'd mix well! Seriously, congrats!

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  5. M: Thanks.

    Yeah, they prolly don't, but I wanted to do a new twist on one of my favorite sayings.

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