The First Day

Hey there,

I spent most of the day working on formatting The Amber Ale of Autumn for Amazon and trying to figure out these self-publishing tools that are available for e-books. I also designed some cover art, with which I'm vaguely pleased. It's cold like November, here, in the U.P., and it looks like it might rain tonight. Thursdays are excellent days, regardless, and I'm sure I'd enjoy a little thunder 'n lightning.

Sure, this isn't the route I really wanted to go down. Every author assumes they're talented enough to go down in the literary canon, to be instantly recognized. Don't we? For a while I did, and I was very conservative about posting any sort of writing on the Internet, especially on a blog. It seems like such blatant puerilism for a supposedly self-respecting man with a B.A. in English who's working toward a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition to be doing this.

Yet, a lot's changed since I was 14 and everybody had a LiveJournal. These blog-things are okay with me. And I hope that by combining some insight into my writing process, talking about my academic work lightly (I'm presenting at a conference in October about my theory of "Little Histories" and increasing composition confidence through establishing what I've termed the "identity dialect"), and tracking the progress of sales and feedback on my debut novel, The Amber Ale of Autumn, I can become a better writer and ultimately a more successful person.

I'm young, you know. I'm 21 right now. And I wrote a novel. And I'm proud of that. And I want to share it with the world. Some may like, some may not.