When I set down the proverbial pen for too long, it can be hard to get any momentum. Everything feels difficult to write. This is not to say that I think short stories should be easy. Far from it. In short form narrative, as a writer, there's so little time to establish anything.

When Nano came last year, Noveling November, I think was the name they gave it, I wrote, as I always write. I expect I will again, whether the new event continues or not. But that's the struggle. Because Nano was focused and productive for me... but it was not, was never, my only writing.

I wrote something interesting last year and hit my word count. And I never finished it. And perhaps I will, as it is interesting. Not finishing a novel I start during Nano, whatever name the month's events are given, is not itself surprising. But that it becomes the only writing I'm doing? That is alarming.

Last year I toyed with weekly flash fiction based on prompts. Perhaps I should have continued that, because it kept my mind sharp. Short fiction. Required words. An exercise for the mind, always. And I say that perhaps I should have continued it because after nano last year I've written only one brief piece of flash fiction. Exactly 500 words, based on a location prompt built from the Deck of Worlds.

Don't get me wrong. It was an interesting prompt. An interesting little story, solving the lack of known with piles of questions. I had hoped, at the time, that it would get me writing again. But it was over two months ago now, and it did not. 

July was a Camp Nano month. A time for shorter projects. So that's what I'm going to do. A shorter project. But I am struggling. I need a place to start and where once I had too many, now my mind is full of fog.

We'll see how this goes.

For well over a decade, my website has been hosted on Weebly.

I liked Weebly. A significant portion of my job involves management of a large CMS based website, and that meant that coming home to do editing on my writing website needed to be easy, simple—straightforward in a way that the work site is not. Weebly did that.

Then a few years ago Square bought Weebly. Square is commerce based and while they gave us the option to try their web options, for an author site they were... not what I needed. I deferred. I waited. My cost at Weebly climbed as I was forced into more expensive consolidated plans.

My writing has taken a back seat to the pandemic and an injury that I've alluded to before. I considered just dropping the site. I considered abandoning writing entirely.

But I couldn't do it. I've maintained and maintained and... finally switched to something new. I know, I know, it doesn't really LOOK like I switched to something new. The look and feel of the site is largely the same and except for a few pieces here and there... the dashes at either side of the navigation, the font size for navigation submenus, a few changes in font color and size in a few places... the site doesn't look much different.

It is different. And maybe even if a lot of the changes are simply a new way of doing the same things, it will still mean I'm paying more attention to something I'd let fall to the side. We'll see.