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We were ON A BREAK!!!

-Ross Geller, on many occasions.

And now, we’re back into hot-and-heavy posting. I got quite a bit of work done on the novel while I had Byzantium’s Shores on the back burner (although not all of it in the right direction – – more on that below), and I got some reading done, too. Breaks are always good, if you’re a blogger like me who suffers from the compulsion of posting nearly every day. If you’re not so afflicted, well, you’re a lazy wanker. So there.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who kept looking in on things here. August ended up being my second-best month for traffic, even with a four-day break. At this rate, I expect to hit Reynolds-like levels of traffic by March of 2087.

I stalled out a bit on the novel-in-progress for the first couple of days of my posting hiatus, which was something of an unintended consequence. But then, late Friday night, while I was trying out new paragraphs and not liking any of them, I suddenly realized that I’d made a serious continuity error that necessitated tossing out the entire chunk that had me stalled in the first place. This involved striking about 1300 words from the chapter in question. I normally don’t like jettisoning chunks of material that big, but if I gotta do it, I gotta do it. “Murder your darlings” is an oft-cited rule in writing for a reason.

I’m also wondering about the mental aspect of all this. Maybe my subconscious mind knew that I had screwed up, and was purposely gumming up the works until I recognized the problem. If so, that’s pretty cool, but it would be nice if the subconscious’s communications with the conscious mind would be a little more, well, conscious. You know what I mean?

(Edited slightly to reflect my actual traffic for August, which I misread before writing the post. I had originally identified the month as my fourth-best, instead of my second. Whoops.)

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