Thus it begins...

Here begins my first foray into the blogosphere...

As an aspiring author, I have decided the best way to get into the blogging scene is to write about what I am striving to learn the most of right now, which is writing. I have been writing semi-seriously to seriously for about six years now, since I graduated college. At first it was a slow process as I didn't devote myself enough to the art and really didn't try to learn about the craft anymore than I had learned in school . I was writing stories sure, and unlike many early aspiring writers, I was submitting my work, mostly to the Writers of the Future Contest. Sadly the results were no good, and understandably so as I was making many mistakes in my stories that young writers tend toward.

In 2009--after failing to win WotF for the eighth or tenth time--I realized that in order to improve my writing I needed to get more active in the writing community. I began attending the two major writing conferences in Utah; Life, The Universe, and Everything, hosted yearly by Brigham Young University, and CONduit, held locally in downtown Salt Lake City.

From both of these sources, after three years of attendance, I have gathered a wealth of knowledge on everything writing related. From story structure, to character development, to plots and subplots, to ePublishing and traditional publishing, to agents and editors, I have learned a great deal about the craft. And it is that knowledge that I intend to share through this blog. I have notebooks full of notes and handouts taken from these events that have helped me in my own writing and I hope to be able to pass on what I have learned and, hopefully, we can all learn more in the process.

At this point I intend to share thoughts and notes on a different topic for writing each week. I'm toying with the idea of ending each post with a writing prompt and following up the next post with my own results of the writing prompt, so readers can see the ideas in action. We'll see how things progress.

I want to thank everyone for taking the time to read this blog and hope that we can all learn something from the pages and pages of frantically scribbled notes I have stored away.