A Brave New Blog by Jay S. Willis

I aim to misbehave, er, I mean write.  Thus, the birth of a Blog.

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, though the form has changed over the years.  From handwritten, stapled-together books in Elementary school, letters to friends out of the country as foreign exchange students in high school, to research papers, journals and poetry in college, to short stories in law school, to novels.  As an attorney, writing is always part of my professional life, but it’s not an exercise is pure creativity.

Legal writing is satisfying, don’t get me wrong.  But in order to maintain balance (and sanity) I HAVE to write.  I spent far too long suppressing my need to write in order to stay focused on career and raising a family.  While those things have an important place, the selfish desire to exorcise my creative demons has clawed its way to the surface and can no longer be denied.  It has been a painstaking process, but I think I’ve finally succumbed and writing has to be a daily mental exercise.  Butt in chair, fingers to keys.  The commitment has to be made before a different kind of commitment comes about.

I spent a good bit of time in November 2013 conquering NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and won!  Managed to pound out 50,000 words, and then some and completed a first draft of a bouncing baby novel called Implements of Sacrifice.  I did not however reach my goal of completing revisions to it, so it continues to molder on the shelf for now.

Long ago, (I won’t finish that thought so as not to draw the ire of Disney/Lucasfilm’s legal department) a world began to form itself in my mind and I started exploring that world in a novel.  I wrote on that novel for many years and I couldn’t say how many drafts it has seen, but an official First Rough Draft has settled itself into place as Volume 1 of a three part story, The Sphere Saga.

In November 2011, I made my first run at NaNoWriMo and wasn’t successful because my desktop crashed, along with many other life-related reasons.  However, that novel wasn’t for naught.  That novel is the seed for Volume 2 of The Sphere Saga.

Fast forward to today.  NaNoWriMo 2014.  I’m 38,075 words into Volume 3 of The Sphere Saga and looking to hit 50,000 words by the end of the month.  The book will be more than that, and it will get completed eventually.

For me, the point of NaNoWriMo is to push myself into developing a writing addiction/habit, which I think I’m well on my way to doing.  It is my intention that this Blog become an extension of just that.  This is a writing outlet.  A tool.

I hope to hone my writing skills and one day be able to write fiction professionally, full-time if at all possible.