I thought it would be fun to revisit some of my old posts from way back when I first started this crazy professional writer thing. This was my very first post from Blogspot, back when it was called "Words... Words... Words..." in homage to Hamlet. From time to time, I'll add commentary in the form of (Italicized parenthetical quips). It should be amusing to go back and look at these posts that are over a decade old.

Original Title: Be Not Afraid of Going Slowly; Be Only Afraid of Standing Still

In the past month, I have officially become a professional writer. I figure this is the best time to try and keep up a regular blog.  I had one over at LiveJournal for a while, and it's still up for anyone to look at. It's at http://mgallowglas.livejournal.com/ in case anyone was interested. You'll notice it's been a while since I did anything with it. (I'm almost afraid to go back and look at what I posted there. I know I was doing mostly writing prompts.)

Anyway.  I've just turned in, hopefully, the final drafts of four stories required by my first clients: Fantasy Flight Games.  I've been contracted to do these short pieces as flavor content for the Call of Cthulhu card game.  It's been an interesting process.  Two of the stories were "Perfect, simply perfect."  The exact words of the project's Creative Director.  He gave me some things he wanted to see from the other two pieces.  An interesting note: the two perfect pieces are the ones I was less sure of; the ones that needed rewriting, I felt, were stronger -- though I can see why the Creative Director wanted specific revisions.  I did the work, and the stories went off to the editor.  I received them back a few days later with some "suggested" corrections of typos and such.  Each of those shamed me that I'd gotten more than one per page.  Very sloppy on my part.  Still, not too bad.  The big problem was again the two stories I'd done more work on.  Each required me to cut several hundred words.  Ouch.  So that's what I did today.  I cut.  Hemingway once said, "You must kill your darlings."  I did.  I have a new appreciation for how Hemingway was able to craft such brilliant stories and images with such an economy of words.  The process taught me a lot about the power of brevity.  I believe I succeeded in maintaining the essence of the longest piece after cutting it from 868 words to a paltry 507.  And that was painful.  I had to cut my two favorite sentences out of all four stories.  Ouch again.

As I said, the stories are off, most likely out of my hands.  I really hope I got all the typos this time.  Line editing has never been my strong suit. (MAN... SIGH.... and OUCH.... SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE!!!)  Once I get word that they are good enough to go to print, I wait the allotted time as per my contract, and receive the first check of real money someone is going to pay me for my fiction.

Now I have to decide what my next step is.  Writing has become so challenging for me, especially after completing school.  While my years at SFSU really helped me to hone my craft, it also opened so many tools and so many different ways to construct my fiction, to think about how to write it even before beginning to set thoughts into words on my computer screen.  It gets intimidating.  Even now, as these words come out of my fingers, I'm starting to think about how overwhelming my old projects are, much less beginning new ones.

Thus, I come to this blog.  It's short.  It's sweet.  It's not nearly as scary as a short story or utterly terrifying as a novel!  In a way, I feel a great sense of irony that my first paid fiction gig was anything having to do with Cthulhu.  My novels are like the OLD ONES, waiting to drive my mind to madness as I consider the enormity of them.  This is easier.

Well, welcome to my blog, such as it is now.  We'll see where it takes us.  If nothing else, it should be an interesting journey.

(Well... that was interesting. I did some minor editing for punctuation and spelling, but otherwise left it well enough alone. Notice the quaint double spaces between sentences. I wonder when I got over that little bit of 20th-century writing. I suppose maybe we'll find out somewhere down the line in the course of these throwback posts. What did y'all think of this trip down memory lane with me? Let me know in a comment.)