What does a blogger do?

Here it is November and I realized I planned to start a new blogging event in March. Time flew by this summer with various events and writing projects, plus preparing for a workshop at our local SCBWI conference in October. Will definitely get back to my March plan of interviewing people in the trenches of children's publishing.

In this day and age, blogging is a huge part of the NEW world that writer's have found themselves in. Facebooking and tweeting and being linkedin as well as having your own website and trying to create an online as well as in-person presence. Somewhere in all this, we search for time to actually do more writing.

This is my downfall as a personal marketing entity. I admit, I would rather do the actual writing than all the other stuff. It's the shy person in me, the one who began writing in the first place because she preferred that to speaking in public. And yet, since I've become a writer, as I tell students when I do school visits, I have spoken to groups of people and sat nervously in booksignings waiting for people more than I ever imagined.

But even though the actual writing can be frustrating, tiring, confusing at times, banging your head against the computer screen thinking...I still love the act of creating, of putting words together and hopefully coming up with something that will inform, educate, inspire, entertain, challenge readers and take us both into new worlds and new worlds of thoughts.

I've met writers who dislike the writing process and I wonder if they are actually sure they want to be a writer? The process afterwards of marketing and waiting and promoting can be fun, but filled with stress enough to where if I hated the actual writing, I'd find a job washing elephants at the zoo instead.

I'm 7 chaptes into a new novel and having a glorious time with it. I know when I get closer to the dreaded middle, the lengthy and plot important part of the book, it'll be more of a struggle. But I like my characters, my story, and the surprises its bringing. And it keeps me from worrying about the book sitting with an agent that has come close to selling twice and the new book I've worked on for over a year that is sitting with an editor who'd asked to see it while I ponder sending another partial of it to another editor who is waiting to see it.

So, I'm back to blogging and hoping to find ways to bring readers here and give them interesting, important, or thought-provoking stuff to read.

I'll be a Magazine Expert Guide for a respected children's writing organization soon, and I'll have links to this blog. So it's time to get moving. If I can just slip away for a few moments from these 6 fun characters who are tellng me their story.